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
You typically do not feel acceleration from gravity, because every part of you experiences almost exactly the same force, at almost exactly the same time, and so does the ground and the walls, and so everything accelerates at almost the same rate.
For instance, we only arguably feel the acceleration from Earth’s gravity (you obviously can tell that it happens, but do you *feel* it? It’s more like we’d notice if it was missing, and we feel the force our muscles need to exert to stay standing on the ground to counteract gravity.)
And we can’t detect the fact that we are accelerating around* the Sun.
For larges gravitational fields, and/or large objects, you can feel ‘tidal forces’. For instance, if you were near a black hole, you might feel your body get ripped into pieces. Or if you were as large and fluid as the ocean, then you’d kinda feel how the moon causes you to bulge towards it, and how the change in that gravity causes the tides.
(*well, techncially we accelerate towards the Sun, due to how orbits work)
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So, I don’t think we’d notice only a planet passing by, at least not with our direct internal senses. (We might see it in the sky, or read the news about the tides changing, or various astronomers might point out obviously changed readings.)
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