As we burn wood, coal, oil, gas, etc. we are converting mass into energy, so is the earth getting lighter?

Question

If so, will we throw the earth out of it's orbit?

Lots of good answers and information. I'm going to have to put this one to a vote. I'm having a hard time picking a best answer.

Answer 1

for real, when you burn lets say, wood, the carbon and everything else is releasted into the atmosphere and will eventually come to rest on the earth, because what goes up, must come down. same thing with coal. and burning wood, coal, and gas shouldent affect the earths orbit. i mean, does a magnet stick to coal, wood, or gas?
i dono. maybe. lol

Answer 2

No, we are converting mass into mass. When we burn wood, coal, oil, and gas, we get other substances. If you ever took high school chemistry, you would know that with any chemical reaction, the product should have the same mass as the reactants. That is why you must balance chemical equations.

Also, the earth is actually on a course to collide with sun, but the value at which we get closer to the sun is so small, it's negligable.

Answer 3

While "Blues Man" is correct, he stops short of a full answer. Converting that tiny amount of mass to energy does not change the overall "weight" of the whole system.

Energy is not "weightless." Imagine that you have a ball made up entirely of photons (which are pure energy). Imagine that this ball is as big as a star. If you dropped this ball on an ant, the ant would be crushed by the "weight," even though the individual photons have no rest mass.

One of Einstein's great insights was that even though light is massless, it is nevertheless affected by gravitational fields AS IF it were massive.

There's another way to express this idea: energy (which is motion) is the same as mass (which is energy at rest). That is the meaning of E=mc2. If you take energy and make it stand still, you have a bit of mass. If you take a bit of mass and break it down into its component motions, you have energy. When you can wrap your mind around this, you'll understand the relationship of matter and energy.

Of course, if the energy released during the burning of oil and wood escapes into space, then yes, the planet does get lighter. Our sun is continuously burning, and as it gives off light (photons of energy) it does "weigh" less and less. But as long as the energy released stays on the earth, no, it does not weigh less.

Answer 4

I think you're right that the Earth must get lighter when we burn things, but not by very much (Einstein showed that when you get energy from matter, like by burning it, you will come up with just a tiny bit less mass after the energy is released). I'm not sure that it would be enough to change the orbit--if you're worried about changes in mass, think about the Earth picking up space debris, like meteorites and the like. I would guess that the change in mass from mass-to-energy is small compared with these other factors.

Answer 5

You are not actually converting mass into energy when you burn stuff. Instead, you are releasing the energy stored in the atomic bonds of the substance by letting it combine with oxygen. In the process, simpler molecules result, which in total will have less energy than the oxygen molecules and the thing that was burned. The 'missing' energy has become heat, light, and other forms of energy that is useful to us.

The only process (we can control, at least) that converts mass to energy is nuclear conversion. This is what happens in nuclear plants, nuclear weapons, and some physics labs. The amount of material used here is too small to have a significant impact on the amount of mass on earth.

Don't worry, the earth is not getting any lighter. In fact, we are getting heavier due to meteors and space debris that fall here on earth. The mass, again, is too mall to have an impact on the earth's orbit.

Answer 6

Actually it does reduce the total mass of the system.

Remember E = MC^2.... That equation applies to all conversions between mass and energy. A fully charged car battery weighs more than a drained one. We have no scales or instruments to even detect (weigh) the difference because it's so infinitesimally small.

Energy = Mass * C squared. Because of the C squared being such a huge number, the mass only recuces by a very small amount to convert it to energy.

Nuclear reactions produce a huge amount of energy because the total mass involved in the reaction is reduced by much larger amount.

Good question!!!

Answer 7

Because a very small amount of mass is equivalent to a very large amount of energy, the change in mass of the Earth is FAR to small to notice at all. In theory there is a change, but all the energy we have ever liberated in the world, including nuclear energy, it is like a million billion trillion times less than the mass of the Earth.

Answer 8

Im not the best with physics and so forth, but matter can not be created or destroyed, so although we burn things, the by product of that reaction has the same mass as it did before, just in different forms. So no, I don't think we will throw Earth out of its orbit.

Answer 9

Yes, but only slightly, because the speed of light is so large. The mass that earth accretes from meteors is more than is lost by radiation of equivalent energy.

Answer 10

Dear, in this case you are converting energy into energy, total mass is conserved and it just take another form, like burning of coal gives you ash and other gases. If you burn the coal with calculated supply of oxygen in an airtight setup then you will see that total mass of setup is same all the time. In Burning you are basically breaking up the old bonds between atoms and molecules and forming new bonds.

With the actual number of atoms and their element type remain constant ( Number of initial Carbon & oxygen atoms involved and those released in final products are same) along with the fact that mass of an atom of a element is universal constant, we can conclude that mass is conserved