Planetary Orbits (According to 'Hypothesis on MATTER')

Scientific Paper
Title	Planetary Orbits (According to 'Hypothesis on MATTER')
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Nainan K Varghese
Keywords	Orbits, Orbital mechanism, Central force, Planetary orbits, Solar system, Celestial mechanism, Astronomy, Cosmology, Hypothesis on MATTER.
Published	2010
Journal	Vixra
No. of pages	28

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Abstract

In any system of bodies, relativistic considerations can provide only those parameters of the constituent bodies, which are related to their relative positions. Use of a reference frame, related to a static central body, causes a planetary orbit to appear as closed geometrical figure around the central body. As the central body, itself is a moving body, this does not reflect physical reality. Although they help to explain apparent phenomena, all properties attributed to elliptical/circular planetary orbital path are unreal. Real physical actions are restricted to real entities and they have to be understood with reference to an absolute reference. Since, elliptical shape of a planetary orbit is an imaginary aspect; it has its limitations to explain real actions in nature. Due to constant motions of free bodies in space, it is practically impossible for a free body to orbit around another. However, they may orbit about each other and follow a common median path in space. Mechanism of orbit-formation and the limitations of orbiting bodies, described in this article, are based on a radically different dynamics from an alternative concept put forward in 'Hypothesis on MATTER'. A planet's parameters, during initial entry into its datum orbit, determine size and eccentricity of its apparent orbit. Only those bodies, which approach the central body from the rear, on the outer side of its curved path, through a small window in space can form stable orbits. Hence, it is imperative that all bodies of a planetary system orbit in the same sense and are (almost) in the same plane. Perihelion/aphelion of an orbital path could be anywhere in the orbit, but the point at which the orbiting body has its highest/lowest linear speeds are fixed in relation to the central body's path. All natural planets, whose perihelion are in front of their point of entry; arrive from outside the planetary system.

Overview

This 28-page article is one of a series in which Nainan K. Varghese applies the mechanical scheme of his book Hypothesis on MATTER to a particular astronomical problem — here, the shape and formation of planetary orbits. Its central claim is deflationary: the closed elliptical orbit of Kepler's first law is not a path any planet actually traces, but an artefact of choosing the Sun as a stationary reference. Because the Sun itself moves, "it is physically impossible for a free planet to orbit around a moving central body, in any geometrically closed path." What a planet really traces, Varghese argues, is a wavy line running alongside the central body's own path, the planet moving alternately ahead of and behind the Sun while both are carried around the galactic centre.

From this Varghese derives a mechanism of orbit formation rather than a description of orbits already in place. A body can be captured into a stable orbit only if it approaches the central body from the rear, on the convex (outer) side of the central body's curved path, and within narrow limits on its angle of approach — a small "window in space." Everything conventionally treated as a property of the ellipse (its eccentricity, the location of perihelion, its precession) is recast as a consequence of the capture conditions or of the geometry of the two wavy paths. The mainstream account is not merely supplemented but replaced: Kepler's laws are described as empirical fits "formulated at a time, when the phenomenon of gravitation and the phenomenon of central force were unknown," and the relativistic explanation of Mercury's perihelion advance is dismissed as an explanation of "a non-existent phenomenon."

The argument

The background scheme

The article opens by restating the premises of Hypothesis on MATTER. All matter consists of one-dimensional "quanta of matter" which build two-dimensional latticework "energy fields" filling all space. Matter content and energy are "distinctly separate" and "are not convertible into each other" — a direct denial of mass-energy equivalence. Energy is the stress produced by "distortions" in this universal medium; the distortions within a body's own extent are its "matter field," and the work stored there determines the body's state of motion. All apparent interactions are mediated by the 2D energy fields, so that "actions at a distance" are avoided; there are no pull forces, and every force is at bottom of "push nature." Gravitational attraction is accordingly not a pull but the residue of the medium pressing two bodies together, because "extent of 2D energy fields between two matter particles is always less than the extent of 2D energy fields on their outer sides" — an explicitly push-gravity account of gravitation.

Because the medium is "normally homogeneous and static," Varghese takes it to supply an absolute reference. This is the pivot of the whole paper: relativistic (relative-frame) reasoning "can give right results only in determining relative positions of macro bodies," but is "unable to provide real parameters of other states of macro bodies (size, work-done, temperature, pressure, matter content, kinetic energy, etc.) or shapes of their paths."

Rotating body moving in a straight line

The core analogy is developed in Figure 1. A point on the rim of a wheel traces a circle only if the wheel's centre is at rest. Give the centre a linear velocity and the rim point traces looping cycloids; increase the speed and the loops narrow until, when the centre advances π times the radius per revolution, they vanish into a chain of semicircles; faster still, and the path becomes a shallow wave about the line of travel. Yet an observer at the centre still sees the rim point going round in a circle, and an observer on the rim sees the centre going round him. Both, says Varghese, are illusions of a moving reference point: "no true physical law can be based on them."

A planet and its central body, whose separation stays roughly constant, are then treated as exactly this system — the planet plays the rim point, the central body the hub. Since the whole planetary system is carried around the galactic centre (Varghese holds that "all stable galaxies are static in space," so galaxies rotate but do not translate), the planet's true path is a wave running along the Sun's own slightly wavy path, and satellites in turn wave about their planets (Figures 5, 6 and 7 draw the inner solar system, the Moon, and planetary ring systems this way).

Central force, radial velocity and spin

The dynamical content is compressed into a few equations. The central force on a planet is given as

F = MGmr / D²V

with M and m the matter contents of central and planetary bodies, G the gravitational constant, r the radius of the planet, D the separation, and V the planet's absolute speed across the central body. Unequal action across the planet's hemispheres splits this into a part acting through the centre of gravity, F_g = 5MGmr / 8D²V, which produces the radial motion, and a residual couple F_s = 3MGmr / 8D²V, which produces the planet's spin — the subject of the companion article "Planetary Spin." Equating F_g to ½mu² gives the radial velocity u = (5MGr / 4D²V)^½. Varghese stresses that this radial velocity is constant but "renewed at every instant": work is continuously invested and continuously lost, so the planet accelerates towards the Sun forever without ever getting closer.

Drifting rate and deflection rate

Two angles carry the geometry. The "drifting rate" −α is the angle by which the planet's absolute velocity V is deflected outward from the tangent to its path; it is offered as the real motion that "replaces the assumed motion produced by the imaginary centrifugal force." The "deflection rate" W is the angle between V and the resultant velocity V_R, and the paper's master relation is

tan W = u sin(θ + α) / [V + u cos(θ + α)]

For circular motion V_R = V, which forces u = 2V sin(−α) and hence W = −2α: the deflection rate must be exactly twice the drifting rate. The same condition, W = 2 sin⁻¹(u/2V), is shown to hold instantaneously at perihelion and aphelion of a non-circular orbit, where the radial motion is perpendicular to the tangent. Since a circular orbit requires the body to enter from inside its datum orbit, and since no body smaller than a galaxy is at rest, Varghese concludes that "natural planetary bodies cannot have circular orbits around their central bodies," allowing only contrived exceptions such as binaries moving perpendicular to their plane.

The capture window

Orbit formation is the paper's most concrete claim. A candidate body must arrive from the rear of the central body, nearly in its orbital plane, at a relative speed small compared with the central body's absolute speed, and with a drifting rate lying between ±sin⁻¹(u/2V). Approach from the concave (galaxy-facing) side is excluded because the curvature of the central body's path adds an outward relative motion that inflates the drifting rate. What remains is a narrow, roughly conical window on the convex side and to the rear, with its apex at the "outer datum point" (Figures 10 and 11). From this single geometric restriction Varghese derives, in one stroke, the prograde sense of all planetary orbits and their near-coplanarity: bodies that do not fit through the window are never captured. Comets, whose greatest speed occurs near apoapse rather than periapse, are inferred to have entered from inside their datum orbits.

Perihelion, aphelion and the datum points

A distinction the paper insists on is that the points of nearest and farthest approach (perihelion, aphelion) are not the points of highest and lowest speed. The speed extremes occur at the "outer" and "inner datum points," fixed relative to the galactic radius through the central body: a planet trailing the Sun is accelerated by the central force, one running ahead of it is retarded, and the changeover happens at those datum points. Perihelion, by contrast, "may be displaced along the orbital path without affecting other parameters."

Precession as illusion

Since an apparent ellipse "is an imaginary entity, it can neither execute an action nor an external effort can act on it," Varghese concludes that "precession of mercury's (or any other planet's) perihelion is only a myth," and that the 43 arcseconds per century recovered by general relativity is a calculation about a non-existent object. The observation itself he does not deny; he re-explains it as a shift, along a fixed wavy path, of the point at which the two bodies come closest. Two mechanisms are proposed, acting in opposite senses. Eccentricity-driven precession: because inertial action is "slower and hence less effective in the direction of motion," a planet takes longer to run from the inner to the outer datum point than the reverse, which displaces the path towards the galactic centre and drags the closest-approach point forward. Curvature-driven precession: the planet's median path tends to straighten while the central body's curves, producing a retrograde shift. For nearly circular orbits the two roughly cancel; for eccentric orbits the first dominates and a forward precession is seen. A supporting argument is offered that precession cannot be a real motion: a central body with several eccentric companions would have to precess at several different rates at once.

Electronic orbits

The final section extends the same rules to atomic electrons. Electrons are treated as structured matter bodies held to the nucleus by apparent gravitational attraction alone, with electromagnetic effort intervening only during "unstable periods" to fix orbit size and eccentricity. Because an electron is tiny and its nucleus's path curves within the electronic orbit, "an electronic orbit is the nearest, a real orbit can resemble apparent orbital path."

Assessment

The paper's genuinely interesting move is its insistence that the heliocentric ellipse is a frame-dependent description, and that the Sun's galactic motion makes the closed figure a projection rather than a trajectory. That much is uncontroversial in kinematics: in a frame at rest with respect to the galactic centre, a planet's world-path is indeed helical, and drawing solar-system figures against the Sun's motion is a legitimate and under-used pedagogical exercise. Varghese's derivation of prograde, coplanar orbits from a single capture geometry is also economical — it explains two facts from one restriction, where standard nebular-disc accounts explain them from disc formation. And the discipline of the article is unusual for the genre: the equations follow each other, the figures are described carefully, and the argument stays on its own ground.

The difficulties are nonetheless severe. The first is a conflation of frame dependence with unreality. That the ellipse exists only relative to the Sun does not make it fictitious; the Sun-planet separation, the areal velocity, and the eccentricity are all quantities computable in any frame, and Newtonian mechanics is explicitly a theory of relative motion under a central force, in which the two-body path is closed in the centre-of-mass frame regardless of how that centre of mass moves. The paper never engages this: it argues at length that a moving hub forbids a closed path, but a closed path in the co-moving frame is precisely what the standard theory predicts and what the wavy path in the galactic frame is the Galilean transform of. The two descriptions are the same motion, not rivals.

The second is that the central equations are asserted rather than derived. The force law F = MGmr/D²V introduces the planet's radius r and its absolute speed V into gravitation, so that it is dimensionally unlike Newton's law and predicts that two bodies of equal mass but different size, or different absolute speed, attract differently. No test of this is offered, and it conflicts directly with the measured universality of free fall — Eötvös- and torsion-balance experiments constrain composition- and structure-dependent departures from the inverse-square law to parts in 10¹³. The split ratios 5/8 and 3/8 that separate radial from spin work are stated with a bare pointer to the book, and nothing in the article shows where they come from. The premise that "all stable galaxies are static in space" — required to make the galactic centre an absolute reference — is likewise carried over by citation, and stands against the measured peculiar velocities of galaxies and the roughly 370 km/s solar motion inferred from the dipole in the Cosmic Microwave Background.

The third is that the precession argument, the paper's boldest, does not reach a number. Mercury's anomalous advance is 42.98 arcseconds per century, known to better than 1%, and general relativity's prediction matches it without adjustable parameters. Varghese proposes two competing precessions, one from eccentricity and one from path curvature, that "more or less neutralize each other" at low eccentricity — but no magnitude is computed for either, so there is no way to check whether they could produce 43″/century for Mercury while leaving Venus and Earth nearly untouched, let alone reproduce the far larger relativistic precession of binary pulsars such as PSR B1913+16. Declaring the phenomenon "a myth" while simultaneously offering two mechanisms to produce it is also an internal tension: if there is nothing to explain, no mechanism is needed. Similarly, the electronic-orbit section requires gravitation to bind the atom, which fails by roughly forty orders of magnitude against the Coulomb attraction it displaces, and the paper offers no estimate that would rescue it.

Finally, the reference list contains only the author's own self-published works, with the frank note that "since, this concept is unprecedented; they are not reviewed or edited." Read as what it is — an internal exposition of a single, self-contained alternative system — the article is coherent and readable. Read as a challenge to celestial mechanics, it does not yet supply the quantitative contact with observation that would let anyone decide the question.