The Sun's gravitational influence is of course much greater than that of any of the planets. Just how much greater can be dramatically illustrated by plotting their combined gravitational potential on the same graph.
REFERENCES
1.
R.A. Serway, Physics for Scientists and Engineers, 4th ed. (Saunders, New York, 1996).
2.
D.C. Giancoli, Physics: Principles with Applications, 5th ed. (Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1998).
3.
P.G. Hewitt, Conceptual Physics: The High School Physics Program, 2nd ed. (Addison-Wesley, Menlo Park, CA, 1992).
4.
D. Halliday, R. Resnick, and J. Walker, Fundamentals of Physics, 5th ed. (Wiley, New York, 1997), p. 336.
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© 2008 American Association of Physics Teachers.
2008
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