Answers to Questions Kids Ask! - Where "Why?" Turns to "Wow!"
Born on this day
September 19, 20111931 - Brook Benton
1934 - Brian Epstein
1928 - Pete Murray
1933 - David McCallum
1940 - Zandra Rhodes
1940 - Bill Medley
1945 - Kate Adie
1946 - Michael Elphick
1948 - Jeremy Irons
1949 - Twiggy
1963 - David Seaman
As you know, planets circle the sun and the sun holds them in a gravitational grip. If the planets didn’t have their own momentum, they would fall directly into the sun. But since they do have momentum (quality of any object with mass and velocity), they do not. They are in a perpetual fall towards the sun, but never really fall to it. If they would slow down, planets would fall into the sun, and if they went faster, they would shoot off themselves into deep space.
Note: the Sun is much more massive than the Earth, so the planets don’t fall down (to Earth) because they are orbiting the Sun, not the Earth.
Link to this question!
Why do we see the same side of the moon all the time?
The moon travels around the earth once every 29 days. The moon, attracted by the Earth’s gravitational pull, travels with the earth and circles the sun every 365 days. The…
Why is there no gravity in space?
Oh, but there is gravity in space! Astronauts only FEEL like there is no gravity because they are continuously falling as if there weren’t. You see, if there were no…
Why is the Earth round?
As far back as 300 BC Aristotle, a Greek philosopher, noticed that everything in space that he could see was round. He made an educated guess that Earth was also…
Who created the globe?
The first globe was created by a German mapmaker named Martin Behaim in 1492. He was inspired by the discoveries of Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish astronomer who suggested that the…
Why don’t you feel upside down in the southern hemisphere?
In space, there is no such a thing as right-side up or upside-down. The globe shows a top and bottom, but it doesn’t mean that such an orientation really exists…