Coorbital

What people said

Recommends candied_orange · 2015-03 · Worldbuilding Stack Exchange · on “Is there a planetary setup with extremely long tide cycles?”

Incidentally Co-orbital might be as simple as this: [this video] or as weird as this: [LINK] It also might be the moons that are co-orbital.

Recommends candied_orange · 2016-08 · Worldbuilding Stack Exchange · on “What could cause extreme gravitational effects to earth without destroying the planet outright?”

Fun things that can happen just because of gravity: Suppose we wanted to have a little fun with the solar system but without actually touching it. The general term for this is perturb but that's dull so let's talk about the kinds with fun names. Slingshot This gravitational effect is how voyager I and II got where they are today. This video [LINK] shows the paths. I recommend you watch it with the sound off. Blech. If you know anything about conservation of energy you may be asking where the energy to fling those spacecraft around came from. Yep we slowed the planets down just to give our craft a speed boost. Doubt it'll send Jupiter hurling towards us any time soon. But we did perturb it. J

Recommends Palarran · 2016-09 · Worldbuilding Stack Exchange · on “Two planets in a stable horseshoe orbit?”

We've seen questions about multiple planets in a single orbit before, using Lagrangian points, through orbiting each other as they go around, etc. I'm looking at the creation of a hypothetical system with two habitable planets orbiting their star in a stable horseshoe orbit [LINK] . To sum up a horseshoe orbit: two bodies orbit a star in nearly the same path. One of them is slightly closer to the star than the other, so it will go around a little faster. When it "catches" the second body, it will be accelerated by its gravity. This effectively pushes the first body outward, away from the star, until its orbit is now slightly longer than the second body. The first body will then lag slowly be

Recommends Sean Raymond · 2017-12 · Worldbuilding Stack Exchange · on “Can two adjacent, life-sustaining planets orbit a star such that they are rarely near each other?”

You could put both planets in the habitable zone on horseshoe orbits. Janus and Epimetheus orbit Saturn on this type of orbit. From the point of view of one moon, the other follows a horseshoe shape around Saturn (or the star in your case). Most of the time they are relatively far away, but once every cycle the two planets come pretty close to each other and have a gravitational encounter -- close enough to have a pretty giant object in the sky for a short time. One planet's orbit gets a little closer to the star and the other's gets a little farther. Here is what it looks like for Janus and Epimetheus, from a frame of reference orbiting Saturn. (Keep in mind that they are both orbiting Satu