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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As others have pointed out, as things stand the sun is expected to explode before the Earth has a chance to leave it’s natural orbit. That doesn’t mean it can’t leave it’s orbit before then. It would just take an outside force.
A large body like a planet, a star, or even a black hole could in theory pass by us so close that it’s gravity knocks us out of our current orbit. At which point the Earth could become a [rouge planet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet).
As unlikely as this is, this is believed to be how Uranus became a part of our solar system. When you rewind our planet’s current orbits knowing what we do about physics far back enough, they start to no longer make sense. When you allow the computer model to have Uranus show up later and become captured by the sun’s gravity, they make more sense. That combined with it’s unusual axis tilt, and it’s moon’s orbits, it seems likely it started off as a rouge planet.
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