If Earth had a large hole all the way thru it. You were to drop ball into hole, what would happen?

Question

The hole is 50ft diameter. The hole goes entirely through the Earth from North Pole to South. you drop ball in center of hole.

Answer 1

The classic answer is: the ball will come out of the other side of the hole exactly as high as it started on your end, will come to a stop, then fall back through. It will then oscillate back and forth forever, always coming the same distance out of the hole.

Of course, this could never happen - even assuming that a perfectly straight, nearly 8,000 mile tunnel could ever be dug. But there would always be air resistance, which would slow down your ball. It wouldn't come out quite as high as it started, and it would lose height every trip. Until at the end, it came to rest at the center of the Earth, 4000 miles down, stuck to one side of the hole.

Have fun getting your ball back.

Answer 2

The ball would exhibit periodic motion. You must think of Gauss' Law wich states that for a spherically symmetric mass distribution such as (approximately) the Earth, all the mass in the spherical shell outside a given radius r has no net gravitational attraction for a test mass at any radius r or less from the centre; whereas the net effect of all the mass inside that radius is as if it were all concentrated at the centre. Thus if R is the Earth's radius and the ball is a distance r < R from the centre of the Earth, it (the ball) feels only the gravitational attraction of the fraction of the Earth's mass within a shell at radius r. In the approximation that the Earth has uniform density, this would be a fraction (r/R)^3 of the Earth's total mass M.

g = GM/R^2 at the surface of the earth
a = GM(r^3/R^3)/r^2 inside at the earth at some distance r from the center
Put these together and: a = g(r/R)

So the acceleration of the ball will start at g when it is dropped and go to 0 by the time it reaches the center of the earth.

Momentum will then carry it upwards towards the surface with gravity slowing it's rise in a reverse of the way it acted when the ball was dropped. So the ball will rise to the sruface, stop, and then drop back down again. And so and so.

After reading some of the other answers I just want to point out that this is a hypothetical question since there are no holes through the center of the earth so assuming no atmosphere is fine. I am not sure that rotation would have any effect since it is specified that the hole is from the North to the South pole and I sould take this to mean along the rotational axis of the earth.

Answer 3

Okay, so here's the problems.First, it would burn up in the core. Second, it would hit the side since the earth is rotating and the ball is not. Three there's no way to dig such hole. However, assuming all these problems are not a factor, it would fall, pass by the core where gravity is strongest, and begin to slow down. At the peak of it's trip, it would probably reach a distance a few hundred feet below the surface because of air resistance. Then it will fall back and repeat. Imagine a bouncy ball bouncing on the floor and slowly peaking at a lower and lower altitude.

Answer 4

Most teachers, engineers and scientists will tell you that it would fall all the way to the other side and stop at the same height as the height at which you dropped it. This is assuming that there is absolutely no atmosphere, so right off the bat it is not even a realistic answer. They will also say that the time it takes to reach the other side is exactly the same time it would take to orbit the earth at that same altitude at which you dropped it, again assuming there is no atmosphere.

But what nobody ever realizes is that the ball will ALWAYS hit the side of the hole, because the earth is rotating.

Answer 5

nicely Nowww... My wager, on no account having been there earlier, is that the bowling ball could be overwhelmed right into a teeny little ball of carbon via the forces impacting upon it approximately halfway down the hollow. previous that factor the carbon could desire to be converted into diamond, and thence right into a veeery tiny blob of molten some thing... i'm unsure what liquid diamond is observed as...

Answer 6

it will burn when it will pass through the core.if it does not burn then it will stuck at core because core exerts too much force of attraction.