How come asteroids don’t falls straight down, due to Earth’s gravity? They should be pulled through space straight towards Earth for millions of miles, right? But I see videos of them streaking across the sky horizontally.
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The Earth is really small (comparatively). Meteoroid, comets etc. are moving really vast (relative to the Earth). Which means the chance of them actually hitting the Earth straight on is incredibly small. Mostly likely they will hit at an angle, or fly past.
While the Earth’s gravity will pull them in often it doesn’t have enough time to pull them straight down. Think about throwing a javelin horizontally; while the Earth’s gravity will pull it down it sill may end up sticking into the ground at an angle because gravity doesn’t have enough time to get it going fast enough downwards for its horizontal speed to be negligible.
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