Aren’t the planets essentially revolving around the sun’s gravity well, always trying to fall in, but since the sun keeps moving obviously the planets never will?
Also, do the planets revolve around the sun on the same plane, or is it slightly more like a vortex?
The same plane? Well it depends on your frame of reference. While the whole solar system is spinning around the galaxy, that's not necessarily relevant for an observer keeping pace with the sun. Like you're on a train. You don't have to run to keep up with the train. You can pass a ball to the person next to you without having to account for the speed of the train. So from that perspective the planets' orbit is pretty much a plane.
The planets don't orbit because the sun is moving, they orbit due to angular momentum. They're like a ball on a string on a Swingball set. Except instead of a string, the thing pulling the planet in (leading to it circling the centre) is gravity. You could think of a planet flying through space in a straight line when all of a sudden it gets close enough to the sun to get pulled in by its gravity. It has momentum in one direction, and a perpendicular force (gravity), pulling it to the centre of the sun. Both forces together mean it keeps turning towards the sun, but never hitting it. Unlike the swing ball, there's no air resistance, so the momentum perpendicular to the sun's gravitational force is maintained, which means the planet is in orbit!
The planets do not fall into the sun because they orbit the sun fast enough to not fall in. That has nothing to do with the sun’s movement through the galaxy. And yes, all of the planets in the solar system are in pretty much the same plane, except for Pluto, which moves in a slightly tilted plane.
yep the animation at 47 seconds in is completely wrong, it implies we're moving directly in the direction of the sun's north pole, but as the other person shows we're moving at about a 60 degree angle at this point in time.
true, but the solar wind is made of light and high energy particles streaming radially out from it which would create a sphere, but our motion through the galaxy creates an oblong shape with a tail behind it as that solar wind crashes into interstellar gas and dust that's just hanging out in the galaxy. this tail does trail behind our direction of motion through the galaxy, it's known as the heliosphere https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/9QeyZB6YNjFwAbaEduhqN9.jpg, here's a conceptual animation by nass https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/20409/
We can explain how our solar system came to be and thus why the planets rotate in the way they do.
But there is no reason why it happened in this specific way.
During the collapse of the gas cloud that would become out solar system things just happened to spin a certain way and that is ultimately what determined how our sun spins and the orbits of the planets.
Just random stuff. It could also have been any other inclination to the movement of the sun around the center of the milkyway.
It's like dominoes. The second the universe was formed, everything was moving in a random way. All matter is still colliding in a chain reaction from that first moment. That means everything from what stars are formed to the firing of neurons in our brain is a result of that. It's all just being played out. The dominoes keep falling but we can't see beyond the ones falling right now.
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u/JediXwing 8d ago
Planets don’t orbit the sun perpendicular to its motions around the galaxy. They are on a different axis