Notes: Universal Motion

Another important aspect to this game is making stuff move. So, in order to make it believable motion and satisfy my perfectionist urges, here's the notes I've taken on the relative motions of the Universe.

Motion

First, the relationship between the planet and it's moon. The moon orbits around the planet - clear enough. It is also "tidally locked" to a planet, which means the same face is always showing to the planet, with a few exceptions. This is also less the case the further a moon is away from the planet. Which means the moon spins on it's axis the opposite of what the Earth spins on, to keep the same face pointed towards the planet. This face is also the "heavier" side of the moon, which leaves interesting possibilities in our project as to the link between planets and moons.

Now, the motion of planets. The planets of the solar system work as follows:

Mercury:
~0.4x the size of Earth
orbits once every 88 days (47.87 km/s)
rotates once every 59 days (10.892 km/h)

Venus:
~0.9x the size of Earth
orbits once every 225 days (35.02 km/s)
rotates once every 243 days (6.52 km/h)

Mars:
~0.5x the size of the Earth
orbits once every 687 days (24.077 km/s)
rotates once every 24 hours and 40 minutes (868.22 km/h)

Jupiter:
~11x the size of Earth
orbits once every 4335 days (13.07 km/s)
rotates once every 10 hours (45,300 km/h)

Saturn:
~9x the size of Earth
orbits once every 10823 days (9.69 km/s)
rotates once every 10 hours and 32 minutes (35,500 km/h)

Uranus:
~4x the size of Earth
orbits once every 30799 days (6.81 km/s)
rotates once every 17 hours and 14 minutes (9,320 km/h)

Neptune:
~3.8x the size of Earth
orbits once every 60373 days (5.43 km/s)
rotates once every 16 hours and 6 minutes (9,660 km/h)

So, aside from the obvious conclusion that the further the planet is away from the Sun, the longer it takes to orbit, there are a few other observations. Planets tend to get bigger the further away they are from the Sun, although size seems to be mostly determined by their composition. And, planet rotate faster the further away they get from the Sun - due to lesser gravity or the size they achieve, I'm not sure.

Will this affect how we organize our websites? With the example of Slashdot being a Sun, could it mean that it's closest planet will end up the size of Jupiter? Or should we compress it down somehow, much like gravity compresses down planets, or would tampering with the fact that the size of a web page determines the size of the planets cripple the educational aspect somehow?

Source: Various Wikipedia articles.