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Pluto's Outer Moons Orbit Chaotically, With Unpredictable Sunrises and Sunsets
StartsWithABang writes: Few things in this world are as regular as sunrise and sunset. With the application of a little physics, you can predict exactly where and when the sun will rise or set from any location on Earth. Thus far, every world in our Solar System — planet, moon and asteroid — has had the exact same experience as us. But out in the Kuiper belt, Pluto is different. The only known world in the Solar System where a significant fraction of the system's mass is not in a single component, the outer moons of the Pluto-Charon system provide a unique environment to study how planets might behave in orbit around binary stars. The amazing takeaway? The rotational part of the orbit is chaotic; the worlds tumble, and hence sunrises and sunsets are no longer predictable.
Yeah - and I thought that the "Turn off adverts" option would block medium.com SPAM.
A tip that can save you a good deal of wasted effort: if the link is to medium.com, they probably havn't got all that much of a clue. Medium.com is a glossy magazine on par with "Heat", "Hello" and the like; I can't imagine anybody with technical or scientific insight wanting to waste time on it.
Yes. It's an n-body dynamical system.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
medium.com's definition of chaotic is getting the wrong coffee from the barista.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They mean it's chaotic in that a small change in initial conditions throw your predictions completely off. It's "a bit harder" like the Mandelbrot set is "a bit more complicated than" a circle.
I can't say anything about the math, but the video does look as if there is a phase change into chaotic behavior, i.e. the satellite "tumbles out of control". Here Nix's oblong shape helps turning it into a "wobbly duck". IIRC chaos means that a tiny change in initial conditions at time T can cause an arbitrarily big change at time T + delta T, thus making the result unpredictable (in spite of there being an exact formula for it) because there is always a measuring error.
Saturn's moon Hyperion is also known to tumble chaotically.