What is a Barycenter?
In astronomy, a barycenter is the center of mass of two or more celestial bodies that orbit each other, or the point at which the objects are balanced. When an object is traditionally thought of as orbiting another, such as the Moon orbiting the Earth or the Earth orbiting the Sun, the center of orbit is virtually never at the direct center of the more massive body. Rather, both objects are orbiting the same point, the barycenter, that may lie more or less off center within the more massive body. The larger the difference in mass between two objects in the same orbit system, the larger the discrepancy in size between their respective orbits. Two objects of equal mass orbiting the same point may have travel in the same orbit and lie at opposite points on it, or they may travel in divergent elliptical orbits around the barycenter. In a system like that of the Earth and the Sun, on the other hand, the more massive body hardly moves at all compared to the less massive one. The barycenter o
