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Re: Bulges



I'm curious, though, what you get as an answer when you consider the case
where the two bodies are *not* rotating. I predict you will get the result
that there are two opposing tidal bulges even in that case, simply from
the gravitational force gradient. Therefore textbooks shouldn't imply that
rotation is the *sole* cause of the bulges. However, it would be
interesting to compare the size of the non-rotational bulges, with the
size of them when the system is rotating, to see which cause is the
predominant one for the bulges.

The gravitational gradient is by far the larger term in this model, but if
one considers that actually stopping the rotation would certainly have an
important effect on the system, it might be difficult to say that rotation
is unimportant! Of course it is utterly incorrect to attribute the bulges
even predominantly to rotation. As I have pointed out several times before,
there are some physical conceptions that seem to occur in textbooks which
have no counterparts in Nature.

Leigh