Ask Ethan #82: Why are the planets all in the same plane?
The possibilities were almost limitless, so why does everything line up?
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” -Vaclav Havel
A number of excellent questions came my way this week, as the submissions for Ask Ethan gave me a great selection of things to choose from. But building on two earlier posts about why planets rotate in the same direction and why our Solar System is atypical, I chose an excellent question from Nick Ham, who wants to know:
Why is it that planets are all on the same plane (roughly of course) as they rotate?
If you thought about the incredible possibilities, this seems exceedingly unlikely.
Today, we’ve mapped out the orbits of the planets to incredible precision, and what we find is that they go around the Sun — all of them — in the same two-dimensional plane, to within an accuracy of, at most, 7° difference.
