Orbit of Venus

Orbit of Venus

The orbit of Venus has huge variations to its extremities of perihelion and aphelion. Precession and recession to its major axis are sometimes as much as 1 full degree of angle in either direction for just one orbit. This is largely due to the orbit of Venus being the most circular out of all the inner planets, whereas Mercury is the most eccentric, so its fluctuations are less extreme.

So if we are to accept popular claims (see introduction) that Venus' Perihelion Precession is just +2 as/Ey (arc-seconds per Earth-year), and then note that the Newtonian N-body-gravity algorithm OGS15 (orbit-gravity-sim-15.exe) shows fluctuations more than +-2500 as/Ey then we are forced to realize that if the 2500 is diluted over 1000 years, this will yield an error margin of +-2.5. So the observation of +2 is practically worthless, as it is less than the error-margin within our realistic observational time-frame. It is just not possible to accurately claim observations averaging +2 arc-seconds over 1000 Earth-years.

The orbit of Venus is so fickle that we would need to observe it accurately for 10 000 years to offer a woeful error-margin that is worse than 10%. But women were always changeable and unpredictable. Bless their ephemeral souls...

It is important to visualize that 5000 as/Ey is more than two full degrees of the orbit that the aphelion-perihelion line (major axis) can shift for Venus after just two of her troublesome pirouettes. This next graph shows a typical example of the fluctuations to the orbit in the algorithm: orbit-gravity-sim-15.exe which operates according to 3D-n-body Newtonian-Planck-gravity evolution. Remember, these statistics are computational, and not historical observation. But the algorithm uses starting parameters from historical observation.

To make matters worse there is no easily observable pattern in those fluctuations, like there are for Jupiter and Saturn. Moreover, the variations between the 2D model and the 3D model are even more extreme for Venus than they are for Mercury. Some variations are as much as 70% higher in the 2D model. This sounds counter-intuitive because the angle of the orbit is only a few degrees away from the ecliptic plane. So why should the 2D model cause 70% more precession and recession to the aphelion and perihelion than does the 3D model?

It might seem like an error in the 3D model. But I have released the actual hard-code of the algorithm to allay such suspicions. I even reduced the Z-axis in the 3D model to zero for all Z-variables, and the results still stand. If you look at the code in the section How to build n-body-gravity algorithm you will see how unambiguous and clear the logic of the computational process is.

I really struggle to explain in words why those tiny amounts in the Z-axis of the 3D model have a much larger than intuitively expected effect. So if you really care to dispute this without building a 2D and a 3D model yourself, then you are guilty of the science-of-the-gaps. Your guesses, theories, and assumptions are not mathematical, certainly not computational; nor evolutionary.

Any effect to the perihelion and aphelion of Venus will be accentuated by her circular nature, that is for certain. So the circular nature of her orbit not only increases the precession and recession of perihelion and aphelion, but it also radically exaggerates the effect of omitting the Z-axis in the 2D model. So it is also vital to realize that gravity is not simply an additive sum.

So although I cannot give an exact answer to the question of what Venus' average fluctuations are, I have easily shown that it is meaningless to claim any observational average to her moody swings. She is anything but an average lady. And I have also shown that using a flat 2D process is radically inaccurate, and tells us nothing about her mysterious and elusive qualities. Only a fully rounded 3D model can describe the curves in the shapes that she embodies.

When I began building this algorithm I calibrated it to measure the precession of aphelion, reckoning that later versions would calibrate Perihelion Precession when the software was more mature, and perhaps the computer itself would be faster, and the results would then be more accurate. However, the newer 4-core Windows 10 computers run these particular processes 10x slower than the older XP 2-core computers.

That is why I inadvertently have results most accurate for precession of aphelion. I wanted to measure both just to carefully monitor any potential anomalies between the two. The applications in 2D and 3D free to download, are all calibrated for Perihelion Precession, and if you want the most accurate results yourself, then you can run them yourself and monitor them for optimal accuracy.

So even though the orbit-gravity-sim-15.exe algorithm offers Scenario [12] as a solution to the precession of the orbit of Venus, I have to concede that my current processing power would take about 10 days to achieve results with an error-margin larger than the amount in question.

I would likely need to run Scenario [12] of OGS15 for about 3 months for a fair result. I am currently running a lengthy sample of Scenario [22] which after over 2000 orbits yields no satisfactory result, then average Perihelion is still fluctuating ether side of zero even at optimal orbit counts. I will post updates if I ever get them.

But currently (2020 February), I only have 1.5 GHz of processing power which is diluted to 10% via the atrocity of modern '4-core' processing combined with lazy old Windows 10. When I started this process I had no way of knowing in advance what future operating systems were going to be doing, and I still feel fairly let-down by the system.

Perhaps future versions of Windows will be able to utilize the sequential code more effectively, and use all the processing 'power'. If you, the reader, have a faster computer, then you could likely squeeze her parameters more effectively than I can. But its a fairly moot point for Venus because observational time-frames would yield an error-margin too big for a meaningful average anyways. For individual orbits, the results of OGS15 could however still be vital.

If you run the algorithm, and obtain the data, please let me know! I'd really like to know what answers my algorithm gives for Venus. Contact me at the Cosmology Forum:
cosmology.africamotion.net

Instead of Venus, the next best planet to measure Perihelion Precession, after Mercury is Mars, due to its eccentric orbit. But first lets just take a look at Earth.

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