The moon also moves sideways in accelerating speed, thus making the distance between earth and the moon greater. Doesn’t it makes more sense that we would say that the moon falls out of orbit or falls from the earth? This question is keeping me busy for over 5 years. I really like to hear from scientists about this subject. Thanks in advance!
In: Physics
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Here basically what orbit is. You have a sideway velocity and gravity. Gravity is pulling the object toward the earth, aka it’s falling toward the earth, but the if the velocity is high enough the object will constantly missing the earth. That’s how all orbit work.
Like i said there is two variable, gravity and velocity. If the gravity is higher, the orbit will become smaller and smaller until the object fall back on earth. If the velocity of the object is higher than the gravity, the orbit will become bigger and bigger until the object reach espace velocity and espace the gravity. If the velocity (well the force behind the velocity, but I want to keep thing simple) and the gravity are equal, then the object is in a stable orbit.
Since gravity decrease over distance, so is the velocity of object in stable orbit. Mercury have an average orbital speed of 47.632 km/s, but it’s 13.07 km/s for Jupiter.
The moon is slowing down over time, because of the effect of tides. The moon pull on the water forming tides, but that water is also pulling on the moon, from one side. This slow down the moon, which mean that it’s orbit is slighy destabilized and need to get bigger to regain stability.
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