(urth) grumble at wolfe comment made attached to guardianarticle

[Jeff Wilson]

On 2/8/2011 9:36 PM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
> I forgot about that.
> But one or both could have an elliptical orbit.
> Again, I don't know whether precession would make this unrealistic or
> not. And 35000 leagues is incredibly, dangerously close for two
> Earth-sized planets.
> But in terms of basic mechanics, a series of conjunctions should be
> possible (for story purposes, I think it would probably be sufficient if
> the series lasted a few centuries).

They could be paired in a horseshoe orbit:

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=210

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >