Okay, I have no idea how true this is, but I learned in middle/high school that with each orbit the moon gets further away from the earth and in a couple million years it might get so far away that the earth won’t even have a moon anymore. Which makes me wonder… how stable is Earth’s orbit? Like what’s keeping us from getting too far away and flying off into space? Or is there a possibility of that happening ever? I’m so curious
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What keeps us flying off into space is…. the sun’s gravity. The sun has 330k times more mass than earth. If the sun were to suddenly disappear then all the planets go flying off in a straight line.
Even if a huge planet hit the earth, it might nudge the orbit a bit (if not just outright destroying the earth), but not enough to knock it out of the sun’s gravity.
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