Quote:
Originally Posted by weby
They are the places where gravity forces cancel out.
|
Not even approximately. L1 involves a partial cancellation of the gravities of the planet and moon, but L2 and L3 involve a direct addition of those gravities.
The Lagrange "points" are circular orbits in a two-body system in which the gravity forces sum in a vector fashion to provide exactly the correct net centripetal force to give an object of neglible mass a circular orbit with period equal to the period of the orbit of the two significant masses around each other.