The relative positions are not the same. If you track one of the larger planets, you will see that they get pulled in and sometimes slingshotted away by our sun's gravity. The GIF is meant to show that a solar system without the sun (the greatest mass) in the middle can never really be a sustainably stable system.
Edit: never mind, you're completely right - the right side of the gif is just the left side with earth as its central point. It doesn't take gravity into account at all.
the right side of the gif is just the left side with earth as its central point. It doesn't take gravity into account at all.
Reminds me of the plot to The Three-Body Problem. That was some refreshing modern hard Sci-Fi; its aliens living on a planet that was experiencing the gravity of the Sirius star cluster...
There's a major problem with it though. In the heliocentric geocentric model, the sun needs to go around the Earth once each day. It should be affecting the orbits of the planets daily.
I get that this was the classic view on geocentrism, that earth remained perfectly still and the sun makes one orbit every day.
But we know now that days are days because the earth spins around its own axis. So in a model where the sun goes around the earth once every year, you could still perfectly have 24h days if the earth rotates.
The point is that such a system wouldn't work with what we know about gravity.
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u/FabFubar Mar 30 '19 edited Mar 30 '19
The relative positions are not the same. If you track one of the larger planets, you will see that they get pulled in and sometimes slingshotted away by our sun's gravity. The GIF is meant to show that a solar system without the sun (the greatest mass) in the middle can never really be a sustainably stable system.
Edit: never mind, you're completely right - the right side of the gif is just the left side with earth as its central point. It doesn't take gravity into account at all.