why doesn't the earth fall out of orbit after being hit by asteroids according to the law of physics?

Question

for every action there is acounter reaction

Answer 1

Well, you need to take more than one law into account. There's also the law of inertia; that an object in motion tends to stay in motion along a straight line unless another force acts on it. In the earth's case, that other force is the sun's gravity. As a result of the earth's own intrinsic motion and the sun's gravitational pull, the earth continues to orbit around the sun (though the sun is winning out, veeeerrrry slowly). To disturb that equilibrium, you'd need a very large mass and/or a very high speed to overcome earth's inertia enough to knock it out of orbit. While the impact of asteroids do have *some* effect, because asteroids come from every direction their cumulative effect evens out.

An analogy would be walking outside on a windy day. Normally, if there's no wind or an occasional breeze, it doesn't affect you much. But if there's a strong wind coming from one direction then you get pushed by it, and a really strong gust can knock you over.

Answer 2

The easiest answer is that the asteroids have such tiny mass (compared to the Earth) that they can't really move the Earth very much, so they don't affect its orbit.

The more complicated answer is this, asteroids do change the Earth's orbit a tiny bit, but not enough to send us flying into space! Lots of things affect our orbit, including trains (which push the Earth in the opposite direction to the way the train is travelling), cars and even people walking! This is also because the Earth is so much bigger than us.

The counter reaction doesn't affect the Earth because it's acting on the asteroid, rather than the Earth, it's called the normal reaction and it's the Earth pushing back on the asteroid.

Answer 3

The Earth hasn't been hit by a big enough asteroid.... yet. The Earth is hit every day by thousands of meteorites that either burn up in the atmosphere or bounce off of the atmosphere depending on the angle they hit. The mass of these meteorites is not enough to affect the Earth's orbit. If an asteroid big enough to knock us out of orbit hit the Earth, the least of our worries would be falling into the sun.

Answer 4

why don't you fall over when someone hits you with a crush up ball of paper. The difference in the mass of the earth and an asteroid is so great it little to no impact on the earths orbit

Answer 5

Well if you look at the size of typical asteroids that do hit the earth and compare it to the size of the earth, it becomes apparent that the earth is far too massive to be greatly affected by such objects. That's a rather simple explanation however

Answer 6

the earth is still too massive compared to the asteroids. the orbit is changed negligibly each time it's hit by asteroids

Answer 7

For the same reason that a train doesn't derail when it collides with a fly.