What keeps the Earth from drifting out into space?

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What keeps the Earth from drifting out into space?

In: Physics

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The sun’s gravity.
When the solar system was forming there as a lot of dust all over the place.
The dust that was going fast enough already drifted out into space.
The dust that wasn’t going fast enough fell into the sun.
Only the dust that was going at the right speed formed asteroids then the planet earth.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The suns gravity.

Think of totem tennis. The momentum of us spinning is pushing us out whilst the string(the suns gravity) is keeping us in

Anonymous 0 Comments

Gravitational force of the sun. Objects with higher mass have higher gravity force which is why we rotate around the sun. One revolution around is 1 year. The earth is constantly moving but because you are also on the earth moving at that speed you dont notice it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

ELI5: Earth is strongly held by a massive invisible force from the Sun called Gravity. Also as earth is rotating around the sun, it gradually falling (over billions of years) towards sun rather than falling on the sun at once.

Anonymous 0 Comments

All other answers are correct when one looks at classical physics. (which are outdated but good enough for laypeople)

I’ll explain to you how it really is when one considers relativistic physics:
Gravitation bends what we call spacetime. Don’t get confused about time, that has nothing to do with your question.
I’m sure you have seen pictures like [this.](https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-cf5713fec706e2b8c4c4ed9b1916c939.webp) This seems intuitively right but it’s nothing more than a model for something we cannot really comprehend in classical terms. Earth in this picture is following the orbit but as there is no force acting on it (gravity is no real force) it is always traveling in a straight path that just happens to end where it started. Think like your an ant on a basketball. If such a ant is walking in a straight line it will end up at the exact same place as where you started. That’s because the basketball is curved. 4D-Spacetime (3 spatial and 1 temporal) is also curved, it just happens to be curved in a dimension that is hard for us to comprehend. From the perspective of the ant the ball is flat (2D) while the ball in reality is volumetric (3D). What we perceive when we look at the solarsystem is 3D while in reality it is 4D.