Physicists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have observed a magnetic phenomenon called the "anomalous spin-orbit torque" (ASOT) for the first time. Professor Virginia Lorenz and graduate student Wenrui Wang, ...
General Physics
12 hours ago
0
132
LightSail 2, the brainchild of the Planetary Society, has released two new gorgeous images of Earth. The small spacecraft is currently in orbit at about 720 km, and the LightSail 2 mission team is putting it through its paces ...
Space Exploration
17 hours ago
2
43
Using ESA's XMM-Newton and NASA's Swift spacecraft, astronomers have found that a hard X-ray source known as 2PBCJ0658.0-1746 is an eclipsing magnetic cataclysmic variable of the polar type. The finding, presented in a paper ...
Virgin Orbit says it has been selected by the United Kingdom's Royal Air Force to provide launches of small satellites on short notice.
Space Exploration
Jul 19, 2019
0
20
China's Tiangong-2 space lab successfully re-entered the Earth's atmosphere Friday under controlled conditions, completing the latest round of experiments in Beijing's ambitious space programme.
Space Exploration
Jul 19, 2019
0
64
Mission planners at NASA and ESA's Operations Centre (ESOC) have spent months debating the pros and cons of different orbits, and have now decided on the path of the Lunar Gateway.
Space Exploration
Jul 19, 2019
0
19
As the Apollo 11 lunar module approached the Moon's surface for the first manned landing, commander Neil Armstrong switched off the autopilot and flew the spacecraft manually to a landing.
Space Exploration
Jul 17, 2019
0
11
NASA's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS), aboard the Aqua satellite, captured imagery of Tropical Storm Barry in the Gulf of Mexico at about 2 p.m. local time on Friday afternoon. According to the National Hurricane Center, ...
Environment
Jul 15, 2019
0
10
Today, large-scale communication satellite constellations, also known as megaconstellations, have been more and more popular. OneWeb launched the first batch of satellites of an initial 650-satellite constellation in February ...
Space Exploration
Jul 12, 2019
2
102
Based on data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and from the Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have gained insights into a galactic globular cluster known as Djorgovski 2. Besides determining fundamental parameters ...
In physics, an orbit is the gravitationally curved path of one object around a point or another body, for example the gravitational orbit of a planet around a star.
Historically, the apparent motion of the planets were first understood in terms of epicycles, which are the sums of numerous circular motions. This predicted the path of the planets quite well, until Johannes Kepler was able to show that the motion of the planets were in fact elliptical motions.[citation needed] Isaac Newton was able to prove that this was equivalent to an inverse square, instantaneously propagating force he called gravitation.[citation needed] Albert Einstein later was able to show that gravity is due to curvature of space-time, and that orbits lie upon geodesics. This is the current understanding.
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