A different star in the sky

Somehow the notion of the earth rotating around the sun has really caught on lately. I’ll admit it’s an attractive notion, but I’m skeptical.

While reading “Einstein’s Universe” I came up with the idea that if everything in space is relative, than why can’t the Sun rotate around the Earth. Really, the idea of relativity in space is a much more bizarre concept than most realize. Time, for instance, can change so drastically near a black hole that you could watch yourself being sucked into it for near eternity. And space has just as bizarre principals when given extreme situations.

So, I got thinking, “sure, the earth moves around the sun in a relative circle, but why a circle? If you were sitting on a planet, (lets say Earth) everything else would appear to move relative to you. If you were stationarly situated above this planet a few thousand miles, the other planets would take on a peculiar motion relative to the earth.”

Really, space is so relative that no one can dispute the idea that the Sun is rotating around the Earth because it all depends on where you are (i.e. if we perceive the universe from an even greater distance we might recognize that the planets are actually rotating around something altogether new).

So, I decided to map out the path of the first five planets if we could do as I suggested above (perceive the solar system from a few thousand miles above the Earth as if it were fixed and the others were moving). What I found is that instead of those boring circles, the planets take on brilliant star patters. I was so entertained by the picture I highlighted the paths and took a picture of it.


(For all the planets I plotted biannually and then just played “connect the dots.” The small green star is Mercury, the large green circle is the sun, the red is Mars and the blue is Jupiter. I don’t know why, but Venus just didn’t make a good pattern so I left it in pen.)