Our solar system mostly revolves around the sun on the same axis (apart from Pluto). Our galaxy does the same (along with other galaxies). Why? Gravity is linear?
Would it matter if we tried to escape the sun’s gravity by going “up?”
I asked this question many years ago on a Usenet group, and the answer was along the lines of what we’re seeing is many millions of years after those orbits began, and that they all eventually flatten out due to the gravity of the other objects in orbit.
So you could have 2 objects at roughly the same orbital distance but perpendicular to one another (eg. one orbiting the star’s poles and the other around it’s equator), and over time the small amount of gravitational force they exert on one another will bring them roughly into the same plane.
Hopefully someone better versed in the topic can come along to explain it better than I can.
Any two objects will orbit each other in a plane. The interesting things start to happen after a third body is introduced.
I feel that might become a… problem.
Space itself is 3-dimensional (or 4-d if you include time…and even higher dimensional orders if you want to get into deeper theories).
The reason almost all solar systems (including our own) are relatively flat, or disk-shaped, is because of the way solar systems are formed. Solar systems start as large clouds of gas and dust which coalesce into orbiting objects. The gas, dust, and objects “flatten out” as they spin around the central star because of the physics (conservation of angular momentum).
So even though the planets, asteroids, etc, in our solar system are all mostly moving along a relatively flat plane, the surrounding space is not 2-dimensional. Our planets also vary in how flat their orbits are. For example, Mercury’s orbit has a tilt of about 7 degrees from flat.
Good to finally see the important words, “conservation of angular momentum”.
It’s a common shape in the universe: large spherical mass in the center, plane of objects rotating around it.
Imagine a new object orbiting Saturn in a random direction. At some point (two, actually), it will cross the plane of the rings. Eventually it will crash into an object. The average of the impact will be closer to the plane. Eventually, it will either align with the plane or its orbit will be unstable.
I like this visual on how our solar system moves Like a spiral, with gravity keeping us tethered to the sun
So, gravity isn’t linear, but rotation is.
For reference, I’m a regular guy who looked up the answer, so maybe someone else can get more in depth, but I’ll offer my basic understanding.
The planets weren’t just plopped down in a straight line, they are all chunks of space debris that flew off of bigger chunks of space debris.
If you covered a ball in paint and spun it REALLY fast in a box slightly bigger than the ball, you’d end up with a line of paint on the walls that lines up with the center of the ball.
The planets are like that paint, but gravity essentially “reaches out and ties a tether” to them that keeps them from going further away. And the whole time, EVERYTHING is spinning and floating further away from the point of the Big Bang.
This answer makes sense to me because of how a gyroscope acts. Thanks.
When things collide, they transfer their movement energy. If things collide like this >- They will continue in roughly the same direction. If they collide like this -> <- their movement will cancel out and they will fall into the sun.
Satistically, at the “beginning of time”, in a random sphere around the sun, things will not be completely the same. So everything will either collide and fall. Or it will collide and continue in roughly the same direction. What we have now are the leftovers that were moving in roughly the same direction and colliding so little that they didn’t fall into the sun because of that.
The same is true for the “disk”: If you start with a roughly evenly distributed sphere of gases or something, there is a middle somewhere where there is a little bit more mass than anywhere else. That’s where things will go.
Actually, the answer is complicated.
Gravity isn’t the only relevant aspect here. Gravity makes that you have to look at the combination of “sun + planet”. They behave like 1 body together. But “sun + 10 planets” is like 10 different of these combined bodies: “sun + planet 1”, “sun + planet 2”, “sun + planet 3”…
Imagine it was different. Imagine a system of several planets rotating around the sun with all their rotational planes at different angles.
This system would be very asymmetric all the time. Now in general when asymmetric bodies rotate, then that motion is not stable. They tend to change their motion, that is, the rotational axis changes until it reaches the maximal inertia moment.
Take a plate or a stick and throw it up high while rotating it at a random angle. Then do it again with a very asymmetric thing. Watch how it’s motion changes.
It becomes stable when the inertia moment is maximal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_of_inertia
For the system with several planets, the stability of the whole system is maximized when all the rotational planes are the same, because then the inertia moment of the whole system is maximal.
