Hacker News Reader

Comment by swores | Hacker News Reader

> After those 54 planet 1 orbits, all planets are in the same position.

Could you please explain what you mean by this, as to my layman's ears that sounds like either a confusingly-worded sentence, or an impossibility (multiple planets in the same location at the same time). Do they just all pass through one specific same location once per orbit but at different times? Or something else I'm not imagining?

View on HN

The planets have nice harmonics, so that rather than planet 1 and planet 2 having some irrational ratio (planet 1 goes around every 2.64782362 times for planet 2) it's round fraction like 1/2. When you string the whole thing, the lowest common multiple of revolutions is 54, so that only every 54 planet-1-years, realignment returns.

The researchers hypothesize that this is sufficiently improbable to point toward an embodied intelligence as the cause.

The Devs thought this solar system was outside our render distance, so they used default placeholder values for everything. Should be patched in the next release.

They're in the same position they started, at the beginning of the planet 1's 54 orbits.

Ahh, thanks

The same thing said different. Every 54 planet-one orbits, a line from the star to planet-one would continue on through the rest of the planets. (* assuming they are nominally on the same plane)

Same angular offset, i.e they line up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com