sidereal period

The time taken by a planet or satellite to complete one revolution about its primary, measured by reference to the background of stars. The sidereal month and sidereal year are the sidereal periods of the Moon and Earth. See also synodic period; Tables 1 and 2, backmatter.

Collins Dictionary of Astronomy © Market House Books Ltd, 2006

Sidereal Period

(religion, spiritualism, and occult)

A sidereal period is the time it takes a celestial body such as a planet to complete an orbit, as measured against the background of the fixed stars. Sidereal months (the time it takes the Moon to complete an orbit) and sidereal years (the time it takes Earth to complete an orbit) are examples of sidereal periods.

sidereal period

[sī′dir·ē·əl ′pir·ē·əd]

(astronomy)

The length of time required for one revolution of a celestial body about its primary, with respect to the stars.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Sidereal Period

the time required for a celestial body, such as a planet or satellite, to complete one revolution around its primary, with respect to the stars. In the case of the revolution of the moon around the earth, the sidereal period is known as the sidereal month; in the case of the revolution of the earth around the sun, the sidereal period is the sidereal year. The concept of sidereal period is also applied to the revolution of artificial satellites around the earth. As for bodies that revolve around the sun, we speak not only of the sidereal periods of planets but also of, for example, the sidereal periods of comets. The relation between a planet’s sidereal period T, its synodic period S, and the sidereal year E is given by the equation

for the superior planets and by the equation

for the inferior planets.

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References in periodicals archive

Every 11.86 years (Jupiter's sidereal period), Jupiter passes under the broad rubble stream.

Perseids to get a Jupiter boost? After the Moon sets, the Perseid meteors could be unusually rich

It takes about 27 1/3 days (27.32 days) for the moon to fully orbit Earth, called the lunar sidereal period. Note the period difference between a full lunar orbit (27 1/3 days) around Earth, and the phases of the moon period (29 1/2 days).

The moon

Strangely enough, the sidereal period did not shift; and since both observations were made in the same experiments, the shift of the solar period looked more reliable.

Regular changes in the fine structure of histograms revealed in the experiments with collimators which isolate beams of alpha-particles flying at certain directions