Tell me your favorite thing about space or else
GLADLY :D
okay. hm. there is a lot i really love about space. one of my favourite things ever about space though has to be lagrange points because they're just so weird and awesome.
so basically, lagrange points are locations within the orbit a two body system (one thing going around another thing) where another smaller object can hang out and move alongside the two bodies as they orbit. nasa's page about lagrange points calls them "parking lots" which i think is delightful and also pretty accurate. if you were to put something into orbit at a lagrange point it would pretty much just stay there without being influenced by either body's gravity more than the other. every two body system has five lagrange points - these are what earth's look like:
so lagrange points are not only a very cool quirk of gravity but a super useful thing in astronomy. lagrange points are an excellent place to put satellites, probes, and/or spacecrafts because they can either fall into a stable orbit pretty easily with the stable lagrange points (L4 and L5) or don't require a lot of fuel to regularly reposition and maintain a stable orbit with the unstable ones (L1, L2, and L3). some examples of cool stuff currently at earth's lagrange points are solar and heliospheric observatory (soho), a satellite that observes the sun and has also discovered loads of comets, at L1 and my most dearly beloved james webb space telescope at L2, where it can observe space while always being shielded from the sun's radiation by the earth.
but like i said, earth isn't the only body with lagrange points! every two body system has them! there are an entire class of asteroids called trojans that orbit at the L4 and L5 points of jupiter's orbit. they're called trojans because the biggest ones are all named after characters from the illiad. nasa are wonderful nerds
another one of my favourite lagrange point things is earth's L3 lagrange point. it's not super useful for astronomy because it's always on the other side of the sun, meaning we wouldn't be able to communicate with anything we put there, but there's been a ton of speculation and sci fi writing about the possibility of a "planet x" at L3; an earthlike object orbiting the sun alongside earth but always on the opposite side of our star, hidden from our view. we know there's nothing there because if there was it would have gravitational effects we would be able to notice and measure, but it's a fun idea and a really cool worldbuilding concept that i'd love to do something with someday.
i hope you enjoyed the info dump :]
