Im having a hard time understanding why we feel acceleration. If a rogue planet crossed our solar sistem close enough to pull us away from the sun, accelerating us until we are expeled into the cosmos, would we feel this acceleration from the surface of the earth?
In: Physics
The Earth is accelerating right now. Can you feel it?
The Earth is moving in a circle around the Sun. Circular motion requires constant acceleration. Thus, the whole planet and everything on it is accelerating towards the Sun.
That’s not because it’s very small (although it is), it’s because it affects everything around us pretty much equally.
When you’re in freefall, you don’t feel the acceleration due to gravity. The astronauts on the ISS don’t feel like they’re accelerating.
So why do you feel heavy when you’re standing on the surface? It’s not the gravity you’re feeling, it’s the force pushing up on you from the surface. This force acts upwards through your feet, and exerts a stronger force on the bottom of your body than on the top of your body, which compresses you slightly.
That’s what you feel. The compression. When you feel a force, what you feel is the internal effects caused by uneven forces. But when you’re free falling towards the Sun, every part of your body is affected equally, as are all the particles in the air around you and the atoms in the dirt below you, so you don’t feel anything, and you don’t notice anything that looks like acceleration.
So the answer would depend on how the force was applied. For example, if someone strapped a giant rocket booster to the Earth and shot it off into space, we’d feel that, for the same reason we feel weight when we’re on the ground. It’d be acting on your upwards through whatever part of your body is in contact with the ground.
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