Wen the earth revolves around the sun why doesnt it fall down into the universe???

Question

I know its due to gravity but for example if u place a bowling ball inside a trampoline and a marble ball it would corve around the bowling ball, but here the trampoline is a medium which bendsand the marble curves round it but in space what is the medium that prevents the earth from falling down and orbit around the sun... sorry for such a long question

Answer 1

Gravity is proportional to the size of the object so don't expect it to work in a bowling ball. The suns graviity is so massive it keeps the earth rotating around it. And the Milky way galaxy is so massive it keeps the sun rotating around it.

Heres the formula

    F = G {m_1 m_2}/{r^2}

e of the gravitational constant is:[3]

    G =     G = (6.67428 times 10^{-11} m^3 kg^-1 sec^-2

m_1 and m_2 are the mass of the 2 bodies and r is the distance between the center of the two bodies.

It also has something to do with Einstein's Theory of Relativity but I'm not a physicist so I can't explain the theory

Answer 2

Centrifugal force equals the gravity of the sun plus there is no friction in space. The planets tend to seek a stable orbit....the ones that don't do fly off into space or fall into the star.

Answer 3

First things first. The marble ball requires the trampoline to prevent it from falling down because the Earth's gravitational field is pulling it 'down'(also note that down is a direction completely relative). The Earth itself is not being pulled 'down' by anything, so it doesn't require a medium to 'keep it up'.

Otherwise, the Earth's motion can be described by 2 theories, one more accurate than the other. There's the Newtonian interpretation (used up to the early 20th century), and Einstein's general relativity(the more accurate one...). First, the Newtonian description.

Basically the Earth is a satellite of the sun. In other words, the Earth is in constant freefall around the sun. Newton came up with the idea for a satellite. His logic for it was that if you throw an object very fast off the top of a tall mountain, it will travel quite a distance before hitting the ground. If you went high enough and threw the object fast enough, instead of falling to the ground it will continue to orbit the Earth in the atmosphere. (this idea is of course backed up by maths, you can probably find the equations on wikipedia... and we know it works anyway, because we have artificial satellites revolving around the Earth.)

  As for general relativity... it's a bit more complicated. It describes the universe as a type of fabric, called space-time. Imagine the surface of a trampoline and let's say a bowling ball and an apple (representing the sun and the earth respectively) sitting on this trampoline. They will both distort the surface of the trampoline in proportion to their mass (the bowling ball will create a bigger depression than the apple). Now imagine an 'equipotential' line in the larger depression. (kind of like a contour on a topographical map, equipotential just means the same height, or same gravitational field along a line, in this case a loop or circle.) The apple will orbit the bowling ball on this equipotential line, without ever falling towards the centre of the depression. (which makes sense, our Earth doesn't plummet towards the centre of our fiery sun, but maintain an equeal average distance from it). Again you can find the maths on wikipedia, but it's pretty ugly. Hope that helped.

Answer 4

hm mm......... well you see the trampoline is on earth, which has gravity. so the earth pulls down the bowling ball AND the marble. but since the marble is heavier, it goes down first, before the marble. the marble is also pulled down but has no place to go, so curves. but you see the BOWLING BALL has no gravity, its the earth! the sun has gravity.

Answer 5

The trampoline/marble/bowling ball example is good to a point, but the big difference in observed behavior is friction.  If the rolling marble was encountering no friction, it would keep orbiting the bowling ball indefinitely, at the same speed and distance.  Objects orbiting each other in space have essentially no resistance slowing down their motion and allowing them to fall to the gravitational center.

Some low orbit satellites, after years of continuous drag from extremely thin atmosphere, do slow down and crash back to earth.

Answer 6

1. spaes-time is not a trampoleen

2. Very littel aer resistans tu drag erth intu the sun (vakyuem very good)

3. gravity du 2 werk on a bowling ball...drop it on yer toes & yu kan see sientifik result.