Of course, at this point you're orbiting inside the sun, so falling into the sun already happened. In that case, the Earth will be inside the atmosphere of the sun, and experience a friction from the solar material as it orbits around, and spiral inward. There's still an argument among astronomers on whether it's going to gobble up Earth as well. In the far future, the sun will turn into a red giant and expand outward, engulfing the orbits of Mercury and Venus. There is, however, a plausible scenario that might drag the Earth into the sun. There's no force that could just stop the Earth in its tracks like that. Of course, this is completely and totally impossible. On the final day, we'd get up to 3,000 C… and then, that would be that. A month into the freefall, and the average temperature on Earth would have risen to 50 degrees C.
Aatish Bhatia over at WIRED did some further calculations to figure out the temperature. Calculate the centripetal acceleration of the Earth in its orbit around the. Without the outward centripetal force to counteract the inward pull of gravity, the Earth would begin falling towards the sun.Īs they days went by, the Earth would get hotter and hotter as it got closer to the sun. A child on a merry-go-round is moving with a speed of 1.35 m/s when 1.20 m. It would be a horrible, gooey mess.īut even if the Earth slowed gently to a stop, it would still be a horrible mess. Anything on the trailing side would be pulverized against the Earth. In other words, anything on the Earth's leading side would fly off into space, continuing along the Earth's orbital path around the sun. The escape velocity of the Earth is about 11 km/s. And if the Earth's orbital velocity was slowed all the way down to zero? Now we're cooking, literally.įirst, let's imagine what would happen if the Earth just suddenly stopped.Īs I mentioned above, the Earth's orbital velocity is 30 km/s, which means that if it suddenly stopped, everything on it would still have 30 km/s worth of inertia. And if the Earth's orbital velocity slowed down, then it fall into a lower orbit to compensate. If the Earth's orbital velocity sped up, then it would go into a higher orbit to compensate. The Earth spinning on its axis gives us a speed of just 0.5 km/s, hardly a blip on. If the sun were to suddenly disappear, Earth would travel in a perfectly straight line at 30 km/s. That’s not really all that fast, if we switch to thinking about it in terms of kilometers per second instead. This is exactly the speed it needs to be going to counteract the force of gravity from the sun pulling it inward. The Earth is traveling around the sun with an orbital velocity of 30 kilometers per second. And with the unspun Earth, it would be totally devastating and super interesting to imagine.īefore we begin to imagine the horrifying consequences of a total loss of orbital velocity, let's examine the physics involved. But it wouldn't be immediately lethal.īut would happen if the Earth somehow just stopped in its tracks as it was orbiting the sun, as if it ran into an invisible wall? As with the Earth turning question, it's completely and totally impossible it's not going to happen. And if it happened slowly, it would still be unpleasant, as we stopped having a proper day/night cycle. Cancel out and we're left with 6667 MPH.If it happened quickly, then results would be catastrophic, turning the whole planet into a blended slurry of mountains, oceans and trees, hurtling past at hundreds of kilometers per hour. Since there are 1609 meters in a mile and then the meters will cancel out the second tool. Since there are 3600 seconds in an hour, then we want to change meters two miles, so we multiply this by one mile over 1609 meters. We want to change the seconds two hours, So multiply this by 3600 seconds over one hour. So if we have 2000 or 29,800 meters per second. For part B, we're going to use our anti from part A and convert it to MPH. So this value over this value and we find that that equal to about 29,800 meters per second, that's your answer for hurt. So then, to find the average velocity, we'll just take the distance over the time. We just need the time in seconds of one year and so that's going to be 3.15 times 10 to the seven seconds in one year. And if we solve this, we find is equal to 9.4 times tend to be 11 meters. That's just the distance between the earth and the sun. So the distance is going to be two pi r where this is the formula for the circumference of a circle and we know arcs were given it in the problem. So for part A here we need to find the distance that Earth travels in one year and then the time in seconds.