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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2025
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Science Memes
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The way this is phrased makes it sound like there's a certain threshold where this starts happening. That's not right. Even a grain of dust wouldn't orbit the sun, they still orbit their common barycenter. A less misleading way of phrasing would be that Jupiter is massive enough that the barycenter of it and the sun actually lies outside the sun, which is still a cool fun fact.
I mean that's literally the point the image is trying to make. The last sentence says the point is outside the sun for Jupiter.
I don't think nitpicking the title achieves anything and it's not even misleading unless it's only taken in isolation.
It says it's so massive they orbit a common point. That directly implies this only happens over a certain mass.
It says it's so massive they orbit a common point outside the sun. Smaller planets don't have their common point outside the sun.
I mean, the sentence either implies what I said before, or it implies that the barycenter is a point outside the sun. I really don't see any other reading than those two.
That's the way I understood it at first. But after reading it again after reading the comments above, I can see the other way of viewing it. I do agree with you that how the sentence is currently written it's confusing.
Yeah pretty much my point. I know you can maybe kinda construe it into the truth if you already know about the topic, like other commenters age saying, but it's presented as educational, and does a poor job at educating with how misleadingly it is phrased.
That's still not entierly mass dependant, the point is at a distance based on a ratio between the two masses, if Jupiter were closer to the sun then the point would be inside the sun. Its still impressively massive to pull the point outside of the sun at any functional distance but so could a grain of dust with sufficient distance and a big empty universe to prevent anything else from interupting things.
Orbiting a point within the sun is still orbiting the sun.
But orbiting a point 1 meter outside the sun is not orbiting the sun?
Kinda feels intuitively correct
The sun isn't a perfect sphere.
I was going to complain about the use of "barycenter" instead of the more commonly known "center of mass". But after some searching, I guess barycenter is more obscure because it's more specific. I'm ok with that.