eli5 : How does the earth not collide with the sun when orbiting
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Because the Earth is moving sideways. By the time the Earth would have fallen 93 million miles (150 million km, 1 AU) into the sun, it has already moved 93 million miles to the side of the sun. This results in the circular movement around the sun. For circular motion, you need a force toward the center such that a = v^2 /r. That force is provided by the sun’s gravity.
Newton had a through experiment that basically explained how orbit starts. If you fired a cannon on top of a mountain fast enough, the cannonball could move fast enough that the curved surface of the Earth would curve away from the cannonball before the cannon ball can be pulled towards the ground, and thats essentially how orbit works, just much further away from the planet/star
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