What type of orbit does the moon take around earth?

Answer 1

A wobbly sine-wave elipse around the sun.

This subject gets complicated in a hurry, and things get pulled into the discussion

that are hard to accept, because everybody knowswhat they learned when they

were 10 years old ... the moon goes around the Earth, and that's the end of that.

Without reproducing a whole semester in Newtonian Physics here on this page,

let's just remind the well-informed adult that all motion is relative, and that

where you're standing and how you're moving makes a big difference in what

you see.

If you're sitting on the Earth and watching the moon's motion, you see it

revolving around you, in a nice Keplerian orbit with a small eccentricity,

once every 27.32 days, and that's what you teach your kids.

Once you're grown up, and your own horizons become somewhat expanded,

you learn that if you were "on the sun" so to speak, you'd see the Earth/Moon

pair revolving around you. If you stayed on the sun, kept yourself and your

instruments cool somehow, and watched these two bodies for a while, you'd

realize that the center of mass of the two of them is revolving around you, in

a nice Keplerian orbit with small eccentricity, once every 365.25 days, while

both of them (the Earth and its moon) are continuously wiggling around their

common center of mass.

Since the Earth's mass is about 80 times greater than the moon's mass, the

Earth barely wiggles at all, and its orbit alone around the sun is much closer to an

unperturbed ellipse. But the poor fly-weight moon is really getting yanked around

by the Earth, and its orbit around the sun is distorted by about 13 of these shallow

"dimples" or waves, distributed all around its solar orbit.

They're not that deep ... out of an average 93 million miles to the sun, the peaks

of the dimples only increase/decrease the distance a quarter million. And even

though the moon is "going around" the Earth, still, from your point of view in

your observatory on the sun, the moon's orbit around you is always concave

toward you ... sometimes more, sometimes less.

So the next time somebody asks you "Does the moon go around the Earth

or does it go around the sun, or does the Earth go around the sun ?", you

can confidently give him the complete, truthful answer. It's "Yes!"

Answer 2

The moon takes a slightly elliptical orbit around the Earth, known as a "prograde orbit." This means that the moon orbits the Earth in the same direction that the Earth rotates on its axis. The moon's orbit is also tilted slightly compared to the Earth's orbit around the sun.

Answer 3

Strictly speaking, both of them orbit their common center of mass.

As the earth is about 81 times more massive than the moon the point about which they rotate is 81 times closer to the centre of the earth than the centre of the moon. That places it beneath the surface of the earth. It is therefore more correct to say the moon orbits the earth (since it orbits a point within the earth) than the other way around.

Answer 4

The moon is in an elliptical orbit around the earth. The orbit is almost circular, with an eccentricity of only 0.055. Its mean radius is about 238,900 miles, resulting in a mean orbital speed of 0.64 mile/second, and an orbital period of 27.32 earth days. The orbit is inclined 5.1 degrees to the ecliptic plane, and the period of precession of the ascending node is about 19 years.

Answer 5

The Moon's orbit around the Earth is an ellipse.

The Earth's orbit around the Sun is an ellipse.

ALL orbits are ellipses. There are no circular orbits, and if an orbit WAS circular, gravitational perturbations from other planets would soon nudge the planet into an elliptical orbit. Circular orbits aren't stable unless there are no other bodies in the system.

Answer 6

It is an ellipse, but not very eccentric. It's fairly close to being a circle.

Answer 7

Ignoring stuff like mountains, almost perfect spheres. Because of spin, the polar diameter is slightly less than the equatorial diameter (oblateness).

Answer 8

The mooon's orbit is elliptical. An elliptical shape is pretty much a flattened circle, or an oval. Hope that helps! XD

Answer 9

I'm pretty sure it's an ellipse

Answer 10

It is in an orbit around the Earth