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Well, they orbit each other, don't they? [Edit, well, to be precise, they are both orbiting the barycenter, which, given the great mass of the sun, is much closer to the center of the sun than the center of the earth]


For the Earth-Sun system, the center of mass is only shifted a few 100 km towards the earth, but the radius of the sun is 695500 km. So the offset is less than 1/1000 of the radius of the sun.


But we don't live in an Earth-Sun system. The point around which planets revolve in our solar system is often outside of the sun as can be seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_system_barycenter.sv...


That wibble-wobbles around much faster than I would have expected.

It looks like Jupiter is way faster than I thought it was. My guestimate for gas giant orbits was skewed towards Uranus/Neptune (84/165 years), but Jupiter orbits in only 12!. It's crazy how close Jupiter is to us.


Thanks. That is a really cool diagram! I had no idea that it varied so much over time.




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