xkcd #2898: Orbital Argument

It's called a barycenter, kids, a common center that both objects circle around. That common center happens to be inside the sun, but that's a topic for next week's class in this semester's AP Astrophysics program.

And that point is inside the sun.

Is this... an introductory course in relativity, disguised as a joke?

Am I accidentally learning something here?

Guys?

Apply that to the flat earth debate and you get an oblate spheroid.

I mean, no, not really. The gravitational center of the sun-earth system is within the sun itself, so the earth definitely orbits the sun and the sun definitely does not orbit the earth. Let alone the fact that the sun’s movement is predominantly driven by Jupiter. (The gravitational center of the sun-Jupiter system is just above the sun’s surface.)

Sometimes, both can be wrong. Both orbit the moon

Technically, the sun is pulled by the earth too so it’s sort of true.

https://explainxkcd.com/2898

the three body problem being one of my favorite scifi until it was kinda solved a couple years ago

Is the common ground the fact both rotate around the super massive blackhole at the center of our galaxy?

Fallacy fallacy taken to its logical conclusion.

The alt text makes this xkcd tier

If this topic proves anything, it's that we should make sure everyone is assuming the same thing before discussing, or clarify before discussing.

You can literally come up with different answers without further clarification.

Mobile friendly version: https://m.xkcd.com/2898/

All is relative. All are right. Or wrong. We are orbiting galactic center.

Ah yes, Sgr A*

As a middle ground kind of guy, I would like to pre-emptively state that a lot of us don't actually think the answer is always the middle ground between two stances. It's just that we're more likely to propose a middle ground solution because we evaluate the plausibility of both stances in a more balanced way (as opposed to existing-stance-holders who are prone to bias towards their own stance.) When the two seem roughly equal in plausibility (which happens fairly often, otherwise the argument would be more one-sided,) that's an indication to evaluate the middle ground as well.

Middle ground folks are often caricaturized as wanting to find the middle ground between an objectively sensible point A and a radically wrong point B, when the spectrum of opinions is sort of like [ - - - - - A - | - - - - - - B ]. In that caricature, we're looking for a middle ground at point C [ - - - - - A - | - - C - - - B ], when in actuality we're evaluating (and not automatically accepting) something two or three steps closer to A. In some such cases, A might already be the most sensible middle ground.

Surly the sun is big wnough that the point actually being orbited is still within the sun?