The energy system of matter - 1912 Author:James Weir Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: its flight in virtue of the complete transformation of its energy of motion into energy of position. In this limiting condition, also, the energy of position of ... more »the planet would be the maximum possible, and its orbital energy zero. The scope of the planetary orbital path is thus rigidly determined by the planetary energy properties. Assuming the reduction of gravity with distance to follow the usual law of inverse squares, the value of the displacement of the planet from the central axis when in this stationary or limiting position may be readily calculated if the various constants are known. In any given case it is obvious that this limiting displacement must be a finite quantity, since the planetary orbital energy which is being worked down is itself finite in amount. 8. Interactions of Two Planetary Bodies— Equilibrium Phenomena Up to the present point, the cosmical system has been assumed to be composed of one planetary body only in addition to the primary mass. It is clear, however, that by repetition of the process already described, the system could readily evolve more than one planet; it might, in fact, have several planetary masses originating in the same primary, each endowed with a definite modicum of energy, and each pursuing a persistent orbit round the central axis of the system. Since the mass of the primary decreasesas each successive planet is cast off, its gravitative attractive powers will also decrease, and with every such decline in the central restraining force the orbits of the previously constituted planets will naturally widen. By the formation in this way of a series of planetary masses, the material of the original primary body would be as it were distributed over a larger area or space, and this separation would be accompanied by a corresponding ...« less