Thanks to the previous post, we know why the moon doesn't crash into the earth. Like how we all know that the moon revolves around the earth, we all also do know that the earth and the planets revolve around the sun. ( with a similar kind of explanation , must be ) That said, the sun has its own gravity too. And the Sun is hugggeeeeee. No denying that ! So why didn't the sun pull the moon to revolve around it, and how come it gave the moon up to the earth? Time to put our thinking hats on!
This explanation is relatively simple this time. No need to brush up on newtons laws. One could say, the moon is closer to the earth than the sun. So the moon feels the earth's pull more. There is more to the gravitational force than just distance. The mass of the objects involved matters too! And imagine the size of the sun with respect to the earth ( I'm not going to quote Googly numbers here, but you get it right, it's very very huge) so the sun's pull ends up being greater than that of the earth's. Still moon goes around the earth. Why??
Let's look at the big picture. Picture with the sun, earth and the moon. The moon goes around the earth and the earth goes around the sun. If you think over that statement carefully, the moon is eventually going around the sun. Normally the motion of the Moon around the Sun is drawn as a kind of Spirograph pattern, but its actual motion is basically the same orbit as Earth with a small wobble to it. Let's leave the calculation of how exactly the path would look like to our wonderfully able astronomers, let's just be content with the fact that the we understand that the moon is influenced by both the earth's gravity and the sun's and it moves accordingly !
Some of you could ask, why didn't it fly off the earth and just go around the sun? We've discussed at length in our previous post about why the moon couldn't fly off the earth. It needed the escape velocity which it didn't have. Maybe if the earth's gravity suddenly ceased to exist, among all other things that would happen ( like floating cows for example ) the moon could maybe run off and get around the sun . How weird. It's just a thought !
This explanation is relatively simple this time. No need to brush up on newtons laws. One could say, the moon is closer to the earth than the sun. So the moon feels the earth's pull more. There is more to the gravitational force than just distance. The mass of the objects involved matters too! And imagine the size of the sun with respect to the earth ( I'm not going to quote Googly numbers here, but you get it right, it's very very huge) so the sun's pull ends up being greater than that of the earth's. Still moon goes around the earth. Why??
Let's look at the big picture. Picture with the sun, earth and the moon. The moon goes around the earth and the earth goes around the sun. If you think over that statement carefully, the moon is eventually going around the sun. Normally the motion of the Moon around the Sun is drawn as a kind of Spirograph pattern, but its actual motion is basically the same orbit as Earth with a small wobble to it. Let's leave the calculation of how exactly the path would look like to our wonderfully able astronomers, let's just be content with the fact that the we understand that the moon is influenced by both the earth's gravity and the sun's and it moves accordingly !
Some of you could ask, why didn't it fly off the earth and just go around the sun? We've discussed at length in our previous post about why the moon couldn't fly off the earth. It needed the escape velocity which it didn't have. Maybe if the earth's gravity suddenly ceased to exist, among all other things that would happen ( like floating cows for example ) the moon could maybe run off and get around the sun . How weird. It's just a thought !
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