Picture this: you’re standing in an open field. You wind up and throw a ball as hard as you can, watching it carve a perfect arc against the sky. For a split second, you’ve just created a tiny orbit. Gravity always wins that particular game, pulling the ball back down. But what if it didn’t? Imagine throwing that ball with such incredible force that it just kept going, falling all the way around the Earth. You’ve just achieved orbit. When we think of orbits, most of us picture a perfect circle. We see a planet waltzing around its star in…