when I drop a disk on a flat surface it oscillates around it's edge before resting.?

Question

seems orbits behave the same way. are the two related in any way.

Answer 1

No. An orbit is caused by gravitational attraction. The spinning disk is caused because it didn't hit perfectly flat and some of the energy from the fall turns into energy of motion.

Answer 2

They are absolutly two different things...even have different words describing them. Example...the planets REVOLVE around the sun, but they spin or ROTATE on their axies. An orbit is when an object travels around a point, or center. A rotation is a single object spinning on an axis. The planets to not spin around the sun. The disk motion you speak of falls into the catagory of rotation. These two words are often used interchangably by my astronomy students, so I guess it is a common misunderstanding of word definition.

The process that your disk is exhibiting as it ROTATES is known as precession. The Earth's axis experinces axial precession...just like a top as it slows down. The initiation of the precession is a result of the disk not hitting the surface parallel to it, but having one side of the disk's momentum being lost because it hits, or stops before the rest of the disk. This unbalance in the momentum causes an acceleration (a change in speed and/or direction) of the disk so the vertical component of the falling disk is changed direction into the horizontal motion...with the aforementioned precession.

Answer 3

I think that when the solar system was formed, the Earth pretty much did not have an axial tilt. But once Earth started getting bombarded by giant asteroids, then there was a tilt, and when another comes along to hit us again, we may end up having more of a tilt, or less.So in the long run, it could be good or bad for the ski resorts. More extreme seasons, and then the weather man on the news wont know what's going to happen next.

Answer 4

NO