How much force would it take to push Earth out of orbit?
So, force equals mass times acceleration, to get the thrust required to accelerate the Earth at the required rate, we just multiply the above two figures together and obtain a thrust of 2.27 x 1011 N, or 227 billion newtons.
But what if something catastrophic happened and we were knocked out of orbit? The sun's gravity would quickly take hold of Earth and we'd go flying straight toward the sun. Turns out, you'd only have about one month to live, and over that time your demise wouldn't be pretty.
Ultimately, scientists estimate that an asteroid would have to be about 96 km (60 miles) wide to completely and utterly wipe out life on our planet.
Since the Earth already moves with 30 km/s you need to add 587 km/s. So you need to accelerate the earrth with 587000 km/s. Force equals mass times acceleration so you multiply 587000 km/s² with a mass of 6 x 10^24 to get 3522 x 10^27 Newton.
Although it's theoretically possible to change the orbit of a planet, it's probably completely impractical. Moving Mars, for example, to an orbit closer to the Sun would require decreasing its kinetic energy enormously – perhaps by shunting large asteroids into close encounters with it.
In order to leave orbit, a spacecraft needs to be going fast enough to break free of gravity. A huge push is needed to do that. Either that push was given to a ship as it was launched or it is given to a ship already in orbit.
Eternal night would fall over the planet and Earth will start traveling into interstellar space at 18 miles per second. Within 2 seconds, the full moon reflecting the sun's rays on the dark side of the planet would also go dark.
Within a few days, however, the temperatures would begin to drop, and any humans left on the planet's surface would die soon after. Within two months, the ocean's surface would freeze over, but it would take another thousand years for our seas to freeze solid.
At the Equator, the earth's rotational motion is at its fastest, about a thousand miles an hour. If that motion suddenly stopped, the momentum would send things flying eastward. Moving rocks and oceans would trigger earthquakes and tsunamis. The still-moving atmosphere would scour landscapes.
An asteroid on a trajectory to impact Earth could not be shot down in the last few minutes or even hours before impact. No known weapon system could stop the mass because of the velocity at which it travels – an average of 12 miles per second.
How big was the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs?
When the 6-mile-wide asteroid that led to dinosaur extinction hit Earth 66 million years ago, the impact also triggered a “mega-earthquake” that lasted weeks to months, new evidence suggests.
With a diameter of about 1.1 km to 2.3 km, the asteroid, named 2022 AP7, is the largest object potentially hazardous to Earth to have been discovered in the last eight years, said the team. It is also likely to be in the top 5 per cent of the largest potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) known.
Alternatively, Earth's gravity could dwindle to zero in a possible future event known as the big rip, when the universe has expanded to the point where everything, even subatomic particles, are trillions of kilometres apart.
If the earth were about 36,000 km in diameter with the same mass and length-of-day then the gravity at the equator would be zero. This is the altitude of geostationary orbits.
That's right, you wouldn't fall straight down. In fact, it'll take you at least 2.5 years before you reach the surface.
We could point and fire an electric thruster in the trailing direction of Earth's orbit. The oversized thruster should be 1,000 kilometres above sea level, beyond Earth's atmosphere, but still solidly attached to the Earth with a rigid beam, to transmit the pushing force.
Finally, the most probable fate of the planet is absorption by the Sun in about 7.5 billion years, after the star has entered the red giant phase and expanded beyond the planet's current orbit.
In order to push the Earth out of its orbit, a giant ion engine should be built and placed at 1,000 km altitude, to keep it out of the atmosphere. However, the motor should be firmly connected to the Earth's surface employing super-resistant beams, to transmit the thrust to the planet.
The hydrogen molecules that make up the outer atmosphere are so sparse that this region is still considered a vacuum. Any spacecraft traveling through it wouldn't notice a thing or be slowed by drag. It does mean, however, that humankind has yet to leave the Earth's atmosphere.
"It's very unlikely," Matteo Ceriotti, an aerospace engineer and space systems engineering lecturer at the University of Glasgow in the U.K., told Live Science in an email. However, as Ceriotti explained, "unlikely" does not mean it's "impossible," and suggested a way it could theoretically be done.
When was the last time humans left Earth's orbit?
Apollo 17 (December 7–19, 1972) was the final mission of NASA's Apollo program, the most recent time humans have set foot on the Moon or traveled beyond low Earth orbit.
The gravitational pull of the moon moderates Earth's wobble, keeping the climate stable. That's a boon for life. Without it, we could have enormous climate mood swings over billions of years, with different areas getting extraordinarily hot and then plunging into long ice ages.
Sun will reach its solar cycle's solar maximum in 2023. In this time frame, when it is most unstable, this is the point where its volatility peaks. That indicates that several sunspots are anticipated to erupt simultaneously during this time. It might cause a deadly solar storm to hit Earth.
Without the Moon, there would have been no life on Earth. … Four billion years ago, when life began, the Moon orbited much closer to us than it does now, causing massive tides to ebb and flow every few hours.
It is the pull of the Moon's gravity on the Earth that holds our planet in place. Without the Moon stabilising our tilt, it is possible that the Earth's tilt could vary wildly. It would move from no tilt (which means no seasons) to a large tilt (which means extreme weather and even ice ages).
Three (Venus, Earth, and Mars) out of eight planets might be able to support life. Based on recent discoveries of planets outside of our Solar System, it was estimated that 1 in 5 planets could exist in the habitable zone of their star: Average lifetime of a planet.
In the best case, the average temperature drops to 32 degrees Fahrenheit in about 400 days, and to zero degrees Fahrenheit in 879 days. These averages, however, include the oceans, and the heat retained there will largely stay there, not doing us much good.
Since the Earth rotates at a near-constant speed (that is, it doesn't speed up or slow down in any way noticeable to us), we simply spin with it and don't feel a thing.
As schoolchildren, we learn that the earth is moving about our sun in a very nearly circular orbit. It covers this route at a speed of nearly 30 kilometers per second, or 67,000 miles per hour.
If the earth were not spinning, you would be heavier as you would feel the full force of gravity. Since there is more centrifugal force at the equator to cancel gravity, your overall weight at the equator versus at the poles is even less.
What can destroy an asteroid?
- Nuclear explosive device.
- Kinetic impact.
- Asteroid gravity tractor.
- Ion beam shepherd.
- Focused solar energy.
- Mass driver.
- Conventional rocket engine.
- Asteroid laser ablation.
When the asteroid slammed into Earth, it wiped out 75% of living species, including any mammal much larger than a rat. Half the plant species died out. With the great dinosaurs gone, mammals expanded, and the new study traces that process in exquisite detail.
According to a study published by Philip Lubin and Alexander N. Cohen, both physicists at the University of California in Santa Barbara, there is a chance that humanity could survive such a similar impact happening in the near future.
Humans survived the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs simply by not being there. The extinction of the dinosaurs occurred around 65 million years ago but humans did not evolve until quite recently.
Birds: Birds are the only dinosaurs to survive the mass extinction event 65 million years ago. Frogs & Salamanders: These seemingly delicate amphibians survived the extinction that wiped out larger animals. Lizards: These reptiles, distant relatives of dinosaurs, survived the extinction.
What Happened in Brief. According to abundant geological evidence, an asteroid roughly 10 km (6 miles) across hit Earth about 65 million years ago.
Will Apophis hit Earth? Not anytime soon. It definitely will miss Earth in 2029 and 2036, and radar observations of Apophis during the asteroid's flyby in March 2021 ruled out an impact for at least the next 100 years.
In-depth. Initial observations of an asteroid dubbed '2022 AE1' showed a potential Earth impact on 4 July 2023 – not enough time to attempt deflection and large enough to do real damage to a local area should it strike.
If a mile-wide asteroid hit Earth, it would strike the planet's surface at about 30,000 miles per hour (48,280 kilometers per hour). An asteroid that big traveling at that speed has the energy roughly equal to a 1 million-megaton bomb. It's difficult to imagine 1 million megatons, so let's try some smaller sizes.
Our Sun is middle-aged, with about five billion years left in its lifespan.
What if gravity stopped for 5 seconds?
If our planet were to lose gravity for even five seconds, it would spell the end of life on Earth as we know it. Gravity pulls objects toward one another. The more massive an object is, the stronger its gravitational pull.
If the Earth stopped spinning, you wouldn't suddenly be launched off into space. Gravity would still keep you firmly on the ground. There would be lots of changes, though. If Earth were to stop spinning but continue to orbit the sun, a "day" would last half a year, and so would the night.
Without an atmosphere, any living thing would die immediately and anything liquid would boil away into space. In other words, no one would last long if the planet didn't have gravity.
Solving the problem numerically, Klotz found that an object should fall through Earth in 38 minutes and 11 seconds, instead of the 42 minutes and 12 seconds predicted assuming a uniform planet.
As you get farther away from a gravitational body such as the sun or the earth (i.e. as your distance r increases), its gravitational effect on you weakens but never goes completely away; at least according to Newton's law of gravity.
The first planet they land on is close to a supermassive black hole, dubbed Gargantuan, whose gravitational pull causes massive waves on the planet that toss their spacecraft about. Its proximity to the black hole also causes an extreme time dilation, where one hour on the distant planet equals 7 years on Earth.
First, the good news: Your blood won't boil. On Earth, liquids boil at a lower temperature when there's less atmospheric pressure; outer space is a vacuum, with no pressure at all; hence the blood boiling idea.
Long-term exposure causes multiple health problems, one of the most significant being loss of bone and muscle mass. Over time these deconditioning effects can impair astronauts' performance, increase their risk of injury, reduce their aerobic capacity, and slow down their cardiovascular system.
What Is the Escape Velocity of the Earth? In theoretical terms, the escape velocity at the surface of Earth is 11.2 km per second (6.96 miles per second).
Depending on where the detonation happened, sending the moon careening away from Earth would take somewhere between 10 billion and 10 trillion megatons of TNT.
How much force is needed to rotate the Earth?
You'd need 5.202 × 1033 (or 5.2 decillion) lb-ft of torque to bring our Earth from stationary up to its current rotation, in one second.
The answer is gravity: an invisible force that pulls objects toward each other. Earth's gravity is what keeps you on the ground and what makes things fall.
The Earth's gravitational field extends well into space it does not stop. However, it does weaken as one gets further from the center of the Earth. The Shuttle orbits about 125 mi above the surface, roughly the distance between Jackson and Nashville!
Explanation: The force due to the upper half of the Earth cancels the force due to the lower half at the center of the Earth. Similarly, any force due to any portion of the Earth at its center will be cancelled by the portion opposite to it. As a result, the gravitational force at the center of anybody will be zero.
How many nukes is that? Well the biggest nuclear weapon ever detonated was Russia's Czar Bomba, or King Bomb, which had a yield of 50 megatons. Please nerds, check my math, but I believe you'd need approximately 600 billion King Bombs to blow up the moon.
However, the reason the Moon stays in orbit is precisely because of gravity -- a universal force that attracts objects. With the right combination of speed and gravity, satellites can fall around, instead of into, the body that they orbit.
Without the Moon stabilising our tilt, it is possible that the Earth's tilt could vary wildly. It would move from no tilt (which means no seasons) to a large tilt (which means extreme weather and even ice ages).
A force called gravity is pulling you down towards the centre of the Earth. Anything with mass also has gravity, the more mass something has, the stronger the pull of gravity.
Knocking out 384.6 yottawatts, the sun's ongoing nuclear fusion reaction is the ultimate source of Earth's energy. In carspeak, that's 515,570,095,700,000,000,000,000 horsepower—about as much as 719, 065,684,000,000,000,000 Dodge Challenger Hellcats.
Newton's Theory of Gravity states that every object in the universe pulls on every other object. Every object feels this force, so it is a universal force. The force is always attractive; it is always a pull, never a push.
Why does gravity pull us down and not up?
The reason gravity pulls you toward the ground is that all objects with mass, like our Earth, actually bend and curve the fabric of the universe, called spacetime. That curvature is what you feel as gravity.
The average gravitational pull of the Earth is 9.8 meters per second squared (m/s2).