Orbital mechanics can be counterintuitive. There was a fairly basic orbital mechanics problem that caused some debate among physicists back in the 1970s. The problem went like this:

You are in a spacecraft orbiting the Earth. You distribute a bushel of apples throughout spacecraft so that they are at rest with respect to the spacecraft. After a long time, where do the apples end up?

Hannes Alfvén (more famous for Alfvén waves) argued that they would bunch up together in the middle of the spacecraft. But Michel Hénon (correctly) proved that half would end up in the bottom front corner, and the other half in the top back corner.

I wrote up a blog post explaining the solution a few years ago: https://joe-antognini.github.io/astronomy/apples-in-a-spacec...