Orbit

Orbit is also a word for an eye socket.

An orbit is the path that an object takes in space when it goes around a star, a planet, or a moon. It can also be used as a verb. For instance: “The earth orbits around the Sun.” The word ‘revolves’ has the same meaning, but 'rotates' is the spin of the object.^[1]

Many years ago, people thought that the Sun orbits in a circle around the Earth. Every morning the Sun came up in the East and went down in the West. It just seemed to make sense that it was going around the Earth. But now, thanks to people like Copernicus and Galileo Galilei, we know that the Sun is the center of the Solar System, and the Earth orbits around it. Isaac Newton discovered that gravity controls the orbit of the planets and moons. Since a satellite is an object in space that revolves around another object, the Earth is a satellite of the Sun, just like the moon is a satellite of the Earth. The Sun has lots of satellites orbiting around it, like the planets, and asteroids, comets, and meteoroids. The Earth just has one natural satellite (the Moon), but there are many artificial satellites orbiting the earth.

When people first began to think about orbits, they thought that all orbits had to be perfect circles, and they thought that the circle was a "perfect" shape. Copernicus and Galileo, for example, thought so. But when people began to study the motions of planets carefully, they saw that the planets were not moving in perfect circles.

In a planetary system, planets, dwarf planets, asteroids and other minor planets, comets, and space debris orbit the system's barycenter in elliptical orbits.

1. ↑ "The Space Place :: What's a Barycenter". NASA. Archived from the original on 8 January 2013. Retrieved 26 November 2012.