Move along the ecliptic and find Mercury Jupiter Mars Venus

Move along the ecliptic and find Mercury, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Uranus, Moon, Saturn. Find Neptune and verify that it is also close to the ecliptic. Change to 2017-02-22 20:00:00 and verify that these planets and the moon are also close to the ecliptic. What does this tell us about the orbits of the planets and the moon?

Solution

This tells us that most of the planest and moon except pluto orbit in suns ecliptic plane.

This suggests that the formation process of the solar system resulted in a disk of material out of which formed the sun and the planets.

The planetary bodies of our solar system all tend to lie near this ecliptic plane, since they were formed from the sun\'s spinning, flattened, proto-planetary disk.

Planets seen in the sky are always near the ecliptic, which means that their orbits are never too far from the plane of the ecliptic. In other words, the solar system is rather flat, with all its major parts moving in nearly the same plane.