Venus' Circular Orbit
                                       
Chris Sherrerd

   Chris Sherrerd is an electrical engineer at the Bell Laboratories in
   Clinton, New Jersey.

   I do not see that the high degree of circularity of Venus' orbit
   presents a difficulty for Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky's view that Venus
   once traveled a highly elliptical path. The ascertainment that the
   surface temperature of Venus is so great that the body is incandescent
   indicates a high degree of plasticity (if not an actually molten state
   until very recently) for the planet's body. If such a body approaches
   the intense gravitational field near the sun on an elliptical orbit,
   considerable energy of motion will be converted by tidal friction into
   heat. This will: a) tend to keep the body plastic or molten; and b)
   change the orbit to that, by the laws of Cassini, which minimizes
   energy loss by tidal friction.

   That is, the effects of tidal friction tend to decrease the magnitude
   of the velocity at nearest passages, which in turn reduces the
   ellipticity of the orbit. If the spin rate is high (short day), such
   an orbit will be still elliptical, with a shifting perihelion and
   slowly decreasing major axis; if in addition the initial orbit and
   equator were severely non-coplanar, strong librations will also
   result. If the spin rate is very slow, on the other hand, that orbit
   will be nearly circular. It seems very credible, not only by virtue of
   Velikovsky's theories, but also by the physics of tidal energy
   dissipation and the current knowledge of the surface temperature of
   Venus and its Earth-synchronous spin, that this indeed has happened
   over the past 3000 years. Also, if there exist strong electromagnetic
   forces, attractive or repulsive, between Venus and the sun, the orbit
   of Venus would tend to reach circular orbit in less time than expected
   by gravitational and tidal-dissipation considerations alone.
   
   To Sherrerd's concluding remark concerning the additional ease with
   which Venus could achieve a circular orbit in an electromagnetic solar
   system, I would refer the reader to a 1970 paper by D.K. Sarvajna, in
   Astrophysical Space Science 6, 258, and to a 1971 paper by L.P.
   Williams on "Planetary Formation from Charged Bodies" in the same
   publication (Vol. 12, 165-171), showing how "a charged body ejected
   from the Sun can be captured in orbit because of electromagnetic
   effects. " (Williams' model requires a much smaller charge than
   Sarvajna's). But to these things I also referred over 20 years earlier
   in the only italized sentence in Worlds in Collision (p. 387). I would
   also assume that Venus' orbit slowly continues to approach a true
   circle.

   Immanuel Velikovsky

   PENSEE Journal I
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