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.

Question

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.

In: 2

Answer 1

Same reason the moon doesn’t get pulled straight down. They are in orbit (around the sun, like most things in the solar system). “Orbit” just means that they are moving fast enough in a circle (actually an ellipse most of the time) that they won’t fall.

Edit: also the things you see in the sky streaking are not asteroids, they are meteors, and they generally burn up in the atmosphere long before they could reach the surface of the earth