How is it that Gravity of the Sun is not pulling us away from the earth? ?

Question

The sun is exerting a gravitational pull on the huge mass of the earth and keeps it in its orbit . We are moving freely on the surface of the earth and we are not tied to the earth firmly.How is it that the gravity of the Sun that pulls all the planets and keeps them in orbit around itself , is not pulling us apart from the earth into itself ? The gravitaional pull of the earth on us cannot be greater than that of the Sun on the earth or on us on the earth.If the pull of the Sun is weak on us on account of the distance of the sun from us , then that weak gravity would certainly, be not able to keep the earth on its orbit. So what is it that is keeping us on the earth without being pulled away by the Sun?

Will any one think about the acceleration due to gravity and its effect on things irrespective of their mass and the fact that the Sun is pulling us also with the same force with which it pulls the earth ?Also to be considered is the fact that the strength of the gravity between the two bodies is directly proportional to the ,mass of the bodies concerned though it is inversely proportional to the square of the distnce between them?

Answer 1

gravitational force is the weakest among all the forces. the force actin on us is less than the weight of a granule. we r pulled the earth only towards the core which enables us to settle in earth. u know the gravitational force between 2 objects is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them & directly proportional to the product of their masses.comparing to the masses of earth & sun masses of human beings are too small.SO the sun's gravitational force actin on us is too small when compared to the force actin on the earth.HENCE, Gravity of the Sun is not pulling us away from the earth & the earth is on its orbit.

Answer 2

Hey, that's a great question! You are thinking like a physicist now and by posing these questions, you will sort things out and become an awesome scientist. This is probably a physics questions though not a religious one. We ( the people of earth) are part of the mass of the earth. The gravity pull from the sun acts on us all as a whole. This includes the atmosphere, the clouds, the ground, the buildings, the dogs, the cars, the ocean, the toys, the people, etc. Gravity is pulling a little bit on each piece. But the force of gravity on the chunk of earth in the middle is so much huger than the force from say just one person that the tiny component of gravity pulling you is microscopic compare to that pulling the earth. F = G m1 m2 ------------- r^2 Let m1 = mass of sun if m2 is the earth in on case, and then just you in another case, we see that the force of the sun on the earth is probably 10^23 bigger than the force of the sun on you due to the mass difference.

Answer 3

I don't know for a fact, but i'm pretty sure that gravity gets weaker the further the distance. An example of this is tides, the moon is on average 380000 miles from the earth, the sun is about 90 billion miles. The moon is much smaller but is closer and there is a visable effect. However you're wrong about we are not being pulled by the sun. We are pulled but we are just used to that miniscule pull (force). So obviously since the sun is keeping the earth in its orbit, things are on a very large scale. Any physical changes we could see would possibly be buffered by the earth's own gravity (especially at that distance). So again we stay on earth because of it's mass and distance comparison. And then the earth, and anything on it is put into the sun's orbit.
a bit confusing, hope it helped

Answer 4

there's a good old equation that works a great deal of the time:
gravitational force=G*mass1*mass2/r^2

G is just a number (gravitational constant, you can look it up), r is the distance between them

if you put the numbers in, you can see that the force of Gravity from the earth, for a human on the earth, is far greater than the Gravity from the sun (acting on the same human)

"then that weak gravity would certainly, be not able to keep the earth on its orbit." try it
using another equation that works
F=w^2 r

set F = the force of gravity between the earth and the sun

w is the angular speed, which is 2*pi/the time for orbit
r is the distance between earth and sun
you'll see it works just fine. put in the F and the r and find the time for orbit. woo a year! (in seconds)

make sure you use the correct units (metres seconds etc)

have fun

~~~~~~~~~~~~
"the Sun is pulling us also with the same force with which it pulls the earth ?Also to be considered is the fact that the strength of the gravity between the two bodies is directly proportional to the ,mass of the bodies concerned though it is inversely proportional to the square of the distnce between them"

what you said is a contradiction. what do you want?!

Answer 5

For a person on the surface of the Earth, the gravity of the Earth is 1673 times stronger than the gravity from the Sun.

It is true that the Sun is 328,900 times more massive than the Earth -- but the center of the sun is 23,400 times further away than the center of the Earth! Gravity force is proportional to mass / distance^2.

The sun doesn't pull the Earth or us into itself, because we are in orbit around the sun. Even if the Earth magically disappeared, leaving people behind, we would still be in the same orbit around the sun.

Answer 6

There are two principal reasons (and each one is sufficient):

1) F = G*M*m/d^2
F is the force of attraction between "us" and a body (Earth, Sun, anything else).
G is a constant to make the units work (e.g., with G = 6.672x10^-11, if you use kg for mass and m for distance, F will be in Newtons).
M is the mass of the body (Earth = 6x10^24 kg, Sun = 2x10^30 kg, Galaxy = 2x10^42 kg, ...)
m is our mass
d is the distance to the cnetre of the object e.g., Earth, mean radius is 6,371,000 m; Sun's mean distance from us = 149,597,870,690 m (however, you could round up to 150 billion metres).

2) Escape speed (a.k.a. escape velocity)
The Moon is far enough from us that the force on it from the Sun is greater than that from Earth. If only number 1 worked, then the Moon would not be held by Earth. But the Moon is not going fast enough, relative to Earth, to escape from Earth. It does not have sufficient kinetic energy to escape our neighbourhood (even if the Sun is pulling on it more than Earth pulls on it). So it is forced to stick around.

Together, Earth and Moon do not have enough speed (energy) to escape the Sun.

The Sun (along with the planetary system) does not have enough energy to escape the Galaxy.

The Galaxy... (and so on)

---

The force of gravity decreases as the square of the distance. Tidal effects vary as the CUBE of the distance. That is why the tidal effect due to the Moon is so much greater than that due to the Sun. But that is a different topic.

Answer 7

Gravity is an inverse square relationship.

Double the distance between two objects, and their gravitational attraction is quartered.

Multiply the distance by ten, the gravitational attraction is 1/100th as much.

Multiply the distance by a thousand, the force of gravity is 1/millionth.

It's about a hundred million miles from the Earth to the sun, and about eight thousand miles to the center of the Earth. This difference of several orders of magnitude keeps our feet on the ground.

Answer 8

The force of gravity between two objects is calculated by the equation:
G X (mM/R^2)

G is the universal gravitational constant, m is the mass of one object, M is the mass of the other object, and R is the distance between them (R standing for radius).

See? The strength of the force depends both on the masses of the objects AND the distance between them. The force the sun and earth exert on each other is greater than the force between the sun and random stuff on the earth, including people, because the earth is so much more massive than people. The force the earth exerts on us is greater than the force of the sun on us because the distance between us and the center of the earth is really, really small compared to the distance between us and the sun. That distance doesn't matter as much to the earth because it's so massive.

Answer 9

Any revolving object around a centre will have an outward force from the centre and this force is called centrifugal force.The earth is revolving around the centre of the sun and there exists a centrifugal force(created due to revolution as above said) away from the centre of tne sun and opposte to the gravitational force of the sun.As the values of both the forces are equall, the earth maintains an orbit around the sun and is not pulled towards the sun.

Answer 10

we are part of earths gravitational system - nothing on the earth is really tied down - the force of graviy is dependant on distance between two objects by approximately a factor of 1/(d^2) - this means the earth pulls with far more force than the larger sun - because we are closer to earth but if the earth was right next to the sun you would be pulled into the sun with a very large g-force and the earth would break apart and be pulled into the sun also.