Say hello to Bary

Jokes aside : being right for the wrong reasons is being wrong
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem
  Unjustified true belief
- It's not wrong. The "common center" lies inside the Sun.
  Therefore, the Sun orbits itself and the Earth orbits the Sun.
- If we’re strict, being right is always being right. If we’re not strict, wouldn’t that imply that being wrong “for the right reasons” is being right?

The way this is phrased makes it sound like there's a certain threshold where this starts happening. That's not right. Even a grain of dust wouldn't orbit the sun, they still orbit their common barycenter. A less misleading way of phrasing would be that Jupiter is massive enough that the barycenter of it and the sun actually lies outside the sun, which is still a cool fun fact.

I mean that's literally the point the image is trying to make. The last sentence says the point is outside the sun for Jupiter.
I don't think nitpicking the title achieves anything and it's not even misleading unless it's only taken in isolation.
- It says it's so massive they orbit a common point. That directly implies this only happens over a certain mass.
- That's still not entierly mass dependant, the point is at a distance based on a ratio between the two masses, if Jupiter were closer to the sun then the point would be inside the sun. Its still impressively massive to pull the point outside of the sun at any functional distance but so could a grain of dust with sufficient distance and a big empty universe to prevent anything else from interupting things.
Orbiting a point within the sun is still orbiting the sun.
- But orbiting a point 1 meter outside the sun is not orbiting the sun?
I was going to complain about the use of "barycenter" instead of the more commonly known "center of mass". But after some searching, I guess barycenter is more obscure because it's more specific. I'm ok with that.

i mean, with that logic, nothing orbits anything

For most bodies the barycenter, while not the same as the center of mass, is still inside the sun. This one isn't, making it notable
You're not wrong. Everything orbits the center of mass of the system, meaning the mass of the star and the body in orbit. And that is handy for astronomers, many exoplanets have been found using the Doppler spectroscopy method. Doppler spectroscopy measures the Doppler shift in the star's light as it is pulled towards and away from us by planets in orbit. The newest spectrographs are sensitive enough to detect a star's wobble caused by an Earth sized body in orbit. The barycenter is still within the star, but not at the center of the star's mass.
No, this is actually really relevant. This is part of the logic applied to labeling Pluto a dwarf planet. Pluto and it's moon do this, Earth and our moon do not. Yes, obviously the center of mass of the two isn't the exact center of the earth but it's still within the earth.
- Asking a physicist about the center of an object is like asking a Tumblr user about thr color of the sky. The only response will be "which one?" And a sigh of exhaustion
  Center of volume ≠ center of mass ≠ center of systemic gravity ≠ center of lift…
- And Pluto knows that Pluto's
  Hot shit
  And you know Pluto knows it
  "I won't ever be a planet
  It don't matter 'cause I know that I'm still"
  Hot shit
  "And you're hot shit too, so get out of your brain And just do what you're supposed to do"
- but the density of an object is variable. i mean you can define the diffrence between an orbit and a co-spiral to be based on the physical size of the denser planetary body containing the orbit center point, though that seems arbitrary.
Fun fact: You actually pull the Earth up with the same force it pulls you down.. Newton’s Third Law.
- I've been told that certain peoples mothers happen to pull the earth with a bit more force than others.

The barycenter is sometimes outside the diameter of the sun. Not always, and I believe not even usually.

Yes, today I'm being that guy. Still a cool factoid.

Well, while we are being 'that guy', factoid is one of those words which has changed its meaning by being used wrongly for so long that the original meaning has all but vanished.
A factoid is technically supposed to be something resembling fact, but not actual fact. (The Greek suffix '-oid' normally being used for that purpose, like in paranoid, "like knowledge" or asteroid, "like a star").
The best thing about factoid, is that factoid is now a factoid. Because it resembles what it is not lol...
Anyway, nowadays, you are allowed to use it the way you did, at least in the descriptivist world view. The prescriptivists may disagree, however. And those people are often 'that guy' ;)
- Since definitions are not facts, the word factoid itself being a factoid is a factoid
- I'd say that the original statement not including "sometimes" does in fact make it the 'not a fact' type of factoid!
I'm kinda stunned that it's EVER outside the sun.
- Yeah, that's the first thing I checked reading the og post before I was about to write 'there is no was it's outside the sun!' ... its such a tiny supergassy mass.
- Outside the sun? Typical Visiblist. The Alfvén surface would like to have a word. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfv%C3%A9n_surface
Well, now I want to know if there's a regular schedule to the Jupiter-Sun barycenter being in or outside of the Sun, and how we can schedule holidays around it.

I believe that's the same for every planet. And every moon. For every orbit.

Its just that the barycenter is inside the more massive object when one is much more massive than the other. Not that this makes much of a difference to anything.

Correct.
I also believe that one of the criteria for a binary planet is that the barycenter is outside either body. Like Pluto/Charon.
- Don't forget the other 3 bodies in the Pluto/Charon system
I mean, sure, but that'd be like saying I'm pulling the earth towards me when I jump.
- You don't have to jump, you're already doing it. Some of us more than others... *Looks in mirror and hangs head
- If you have ever done a handstand then you have lifted over your head the weight that the entire mass of the earth has in your own gravitational field.
- Isn't that canceled out by the pushing you do when you start to jump?
Pluto and it's biggest moon Charon about for the very center outside of each other. This means that you could build a space elevator directly between the surface of each of them and it would rotate around that point since they're also tightly locked.
Asteroids everything does to some degree even if miniscule I'd assume.

Your mom's so fat, she pushes the barycenter of the solar system outside of the diameter of the Sun

Top tier comment right here!

This is true about any 2 objects with mass.

No, it is not true in general that the barycenter lies outside both objects.
- I mean, sure, but you can reasonably glean that I'm just talking about the fact that any 2 objects with mass exert gravity on each other. The OP is facebook-tier
"outside the objects"
- Barycenters are not necessarily outside the objects, either.
- It was outside the environment.

Do all the planets also orbit around that same barycenter, or does each planet have a different one?

Technically speaking, no celestial body in our solar system orbits around a single point. The barycenter thing only works with two bodies. When there are more than two bodies, such as in our solar system, the orbits become chaotic. Granted, the influence between planets is small, so they all appear to orbit their barycenters with the sun, but there are small perturbations to the orbits caused by the locations and masses of all the other bodies in the solar system.
- Isn't that the 3-body-problem? That already with 3 bodies affecting each other a system is chaotic.
All the solar system matter contributes to an object's orbital center but that's constantly moving as the system moves.
I think (?) most planets have their barycenter inside the sun's surface
The gravitational pull of system matter pales in comparison to the sun so you don't need to consider it for amateur purposes.
You can try KSP (Vanilla) versus Kopernicus mod if you want to feel the difference.
Also called n-body
I guess they all orbit around the solar system's center of mass (negligibly affected by the universal CoM), but that CoM probably moves around as the planets themselves move.
Relative to what, you might ask? That depends who you're asking 😉
The barycenter is different for each planet-sun (or any two object) pairing.
The earth and moon have a barycenter which is beneath the surface of earth. Likewise, the barycenter of the sun-earth pair is below the surface of the sun
Edit:
The barycenter of our solar system orbits the center of our galaxy (again in a barycentric manner)

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So the Sun is wobbling arround, because of the 3 giants. Fascinating.

Here’s an animation
Universe Sandbox
- 3D makes it 100 times better!
Well, mostly Jupiter and a little bit of Saturn.
Like a brick in a washing machine
I wish that was updated for the current year (and beyond) It's important to know when giving OP's statement whether it's outside the sun at the moment
- Here you go:
The link in your post links to a different image. Was that on purpose?
- Oopsy, fixed.
- Links to some AI slop 🫩

Jeeezzz...Gravity is relentless.

Gravity always wins
- Dark energy would like a word

In a field of study where it’s not just acceptable, but prudent to round pi to “1” because the numbers are that big….

I gotta say, it’s close enough to say Jupiter orbits Sol. Just saying.

Nah, there is no way any astronomer studying orbital mechanics in our solar system is rounding pi to 1. There is virtually no practical calculation you could do on the mechanics of the sun or planets where rounding a known constant by a factor of 3 would yield any useful result whatsoever.
Rounding pi to 1 only makes sense when the uncertainty in the numbers is large, not the magnitude of the numbers, and we know the masses and distances of the objects in our solar system to an amazing level of precision!
Plus, the fact that Jupiter is massive enough to actually exert an influence that large on the sun is pretty fucking cool!
- The reason being, that once you go large enough, a multiplier of three is irrelevant, and they only really care about orders of magnitude. You might be tempted to argue that that doesn't happen inside the solar system, and you'd be right. Mostly.
  Except that astronomy doesn't concern itself with just our system. So yes. Astronomers do frequently round to 1 because it really doesn't matter that much in the scheme of things. (particularly talking about distances.) it's even more so for cosmology.
Just wait until you see their periodic table of elements.
Rounding pi to 1? Not even 3? Source please? Because what?
- fermi approximations happen all the time in astronomy. The numbers are frequently so large that the only meaningful quality is how many orders of magnitude it has.
  More to the point, using pi makes calculating things much harder. For example, we don’t really need a precise distance for most things; so using “3” makes the calculation unnecessarily spend time in computation.
  It’s like the old joke, “what’s the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire?” (“About a billion.”)

Is it more true to say that Jupiter (and the other planets and asteroid belts and dust clouds in our solar system) orbits the Sun, and the Sun orbits the barycenter? The barycenter that the sun revolves around is influenced (marginally) by the other bodies in the solar system and not just Jupiter. If the definition of a barycenter is to be interpreted as this image suggests, that would mean that no material object orbits another material object and they instead orbit their collective center of mass somewhere in space.

Edit: to clarify, I understand the physics and motion at play. The phrasing just seems misleading/incorrect to me.

no material object orbits another material object and they instead orbit their collective center of mass somewhere in space.
That’s exactly what happens. Why do you think this is incorrect?
- It seems to fundamentally change what it means “to orbit” something.
  As I understood the term, orbiting would be used correctly in these cases:
  A lighter object orbits a heavier object, and both of their paths of motion are elliptical about their barycenter
  Two objects of identical mass orbit each other, and their paths of motion are circular about their barycenter
  In contrast, the image above implies the following:
  A lighter object does not orbit a heavier object; they both orbit their barycenter with an elliptical path of motion
  Two objects of identical mass do not orbit each other; they both orbit their barycenter with a circular path of motion
  Even the Wikipedia page for barycenter, which OP linked to, opens with the following:
  “the barycenter… is the center of mass of two or more bodies that orbit one another and is the point about which the bodies orbit.”
  Perhaps “orbit” as a verb has two meanings, depending on the specificity of the context.

That’s why I lose my balance!

I found it super helpful to have the Sun's center of mass labeled!

I only wish Jupiter's center of mass was also labeled in this graphic. I've been trying to puzzle it out myself, but I'm stumped!

I think if it's to scale, Jupiter is way offscreen, like in another room in your building far away.

how much wobble does the earth add to sun? over 1m?

Jupiter is so massive, if you give it more hydrogen, it gets smaller.

My dumb friend wants to know why adding more mass would make Jupiter smaller, can you help explain it to him?
- The increased mass increases the force of gravity on the outer particles which ends up reducing the radius more than the increase due to the layer of new hydrogen, IIRC.
- I misrembered, it remains roughly the same volume, until 1.6 juipiters of mass, at which point the effect of gravity from each additional hydrogen is greater than the intermolecular forces and additional hydrogen would cause it to compress more than it would grow.
- The volume of Jupiter is mostly gas. If you increase the mass enough, at some point the higher gravity and thus higher pressure at the center causes a phase change of enough mass (from gas to liquid or liquid to solid) that the lost volume from the phase change exceeds the original volume of the added mass.
  It's like pushing a bunch of origami paper into a box until a bunch of them collapse and fall flat instead of filling the volume.
- Imagine a stack of glass cups. It gets tall enough that the bottom glasses break under the weight of the new glasses. Tada!
- Is your friend the same crazy person I know who doesn't eat meat? Are they crazy?
  _i don't know why your comment made me think of that reference _

Fun fact: if I threw a rock hard enough, it and the sun would orbit around their "barycenter" which would happen to be just about the center of the sun (probably, i dont work here).

No one objects orbits another. There are no stable orbits since there are no examples of two perfect point masses in an isolated space.

just assume a spherical cow, dude

I’m no astronomical guru, but I’m surprised I didn’t know this.

When I was a kid, we were taught there's 9 and only 9 planets, they all orbit the sun, and humans have existed for at least 30 years.
Now I find out 1 of those 9 planets was a fraud. Theres also thousands of OTHER planets outside our solar system. And also, time is an illusion only placed in our reality to distract us from the concept of a realized immortality. We die when we want. We come into this world naked, bloody, covered in goo, and getting spanked until we cry. And we die the same way....when we WANT to!
School is all a bunch of lies man! Trust your instincts! Consume prilosec!
- humans have existed for at least 30 years.
  True

I really want a space station in the barycenter of Pluto or something. It would be as close to true neutral of gravity instead of the gravity negated by acceleration of mass that may or may not screw up gravity experiments

Except there are all the other planets swinging in the way, with their own gravitational influence.
I think what you're looking for is a Lagrange point, specifically L1, where the gravitational pull from both bodies are equal, so they cancel out
- Fun fact, we can theoretically use that to build a space elevator on the moon. Last I checked, Nylon was strong enough to build the needed cables

Your mom....