At least this theory suggests it might be.
In short, the Sun is collecting dark matter on its journey through space, increasing its apparent mass, thus slowly shrinking Earth's orbit. Apparently, this should cause the semi-major axis of Earth's orbit to increase, which we can measure, and is only out by a factor of 2 or so from the observed.
Hmmm.
Neapolitan
4 years ago
2 comments:
You haven't explained why this means that "the earth is plunging toward the Sun". If the semimajor axis is increasing, we'll be further away more of the time. Or is this suggesting that the semiminor axis is proportionally decreasing?
Simply that the theory of dark matter collection by the Sun suggests that the Earths orbit would decrease with the increased mass of the attractor.
The link suggests that a side effect of this would be an increase in the semi major axis of the orbit, measurable, and confirmed.
"the osculating semimajor axis of a gradually shrinking trajectory around a mass-increasing central body gets larger."
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