OT: Gravity, Dark Energy, Universal expansion

[Suicide Junkie]

Its not the angular speed, but a phase shift that I was talking about.

Measurements of Earth's acceleration show that we are accelerating towards the Sun's current position (to the precision of the instruments), not its position 8 minutes ago.
If the acceleration isn't directly in line with the center of mass, then there will be an an angular acceleration component, which is bad news.

PS:
The center of mass is not 6 cm from the center of the sun, but about 500km according to some quick math.
1 AU makes for a very long lever

[Baron Munchausen]

The current position of the sun according to what measurement? If it's the visible position of the sun, it's towards where the sun was 8 minutes ago. Have they somehow measured that the earth is moving relative to where the sun is -- 8 minutes travel from its visible position? That would be big news if so, because it would be proof that gravity propagates faster than light. I'm pretty sure I would have heard about this.

And I didn't do any math about where the system's center of gravity is, I was just tossing out a number. The planets do have about 98 percent of the system's angular momentum, but the sun has 99.5 percent of the system's mass.

[Suicide Junkie]

I thought that was obvious given the context.

Basically the Earth's acceleration is not in the same direction as the incident light from the sun.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

It wouldn't be that hard to predict the suns' position in eight minutes.

So. If gravity is found to travel at c and the earth orbits the suns' actual position...Could gravity be 'connected' to the object it came from?

[Raapys]

I'm confused. So there's both experiments that show that gravity is indeed travelling at the speed of light( or close to it ), and actual observations of the opposite?

Then that would indicate, as narf says, that there's some sort of connection to the object it came from. Perhaps gravity 'predicts' where the sun is going to be at the moment it reaches earth?

So if something was to suddenly push the sun out of its original and predictable path, it might take a while before gravity would catch up and start pulling us in the right direction again.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

That's what people are saying. I have little knowledge of the situation - Just trying to make sense of it.