What keeps the planets in our solar system in it's orbital path?
Question:
Answer:
gravity
The sun's gravitational pull! thats easy i just learned that in science last week!!
The Gravittaional pull of the sun.
centripetal and centrifugal forces
ya gravity..ryt...
gravity
Gravity.
i think its the sun gravitational pull (please ignore spelling)
gravity keeps them in orbit.
Cables coming right out of the sun are attached to each planets. As the planets try to escape by pulling away from the sun, they are restrained by the cables.
The gravitational pull of the sun keeps the planets our slar system in its orbital path.
GRAVITY DUUUH!
The powerful gravity of the sun allows the planet in our solar system to follow its path around the sun.
stfu all of you. gravity is an obvious and ignorant answer. What this asker (and me as well) are curious about is how the planets maintain a consistent path around the sun rather than being overcome by its gravity and sucked in or simply cast out into space by their own momentum. How is it that mercury is much closer to the sun than Neptune, yet murcury is not overcome by the sun's gravity, and Neptuen is not cast into space. Comets also orbit around the sun, and are gone for hundreds of years at a time before they return. Its an interesting concept. too bad the US public is not exactly known for having broad minds.
The answer really is that the gravity of the sun keeps the planets orbiting the sun. A deeper reason is that we see today the survivors -- the objects whose orbits didn't send them into the sun or out of the solar system.
The reason the planets continue in more or less their same orbits (the orbits do actually change over time) is that they are moving fast enough to avoid falling in. (The objects that weren't moving fast enough to avoid falling in fell into the sun billions of years ago.)
Here's what might be a more satisfying answer. The solar system is thought to have condensed from gas and dust that formed a swirling nebula. As particles moved randomly within the nebula, their very tiny gravitational attraction and occasional collisions caused lumps to form. The bigger lumps were able to attract more matter, and got bigger rapidly. The biggest of them became the sun. The smaller lumps became proto-planets that orbited around the sun.
More collisions and the gravitational forces among the proto-planets no doubt knocked some of them into the sun and others out of orbit and out of the solar system. The planets exerted gravitational pulls on one another and forced one another into the same orbital plane. (Jupiter as the most massive planet had the greatest effect.)
Earth's distance from the sun varies by only about 2% during the year - about 91.9 million miles at the closest and about 94.1 million miles at the farthest. Suppose our orbit varied by 15%, so that at perihelion earth was 86 million miles from the sun and at aphelion earth was at 100 million miles from the sun. We'd be appreciably closer to Venus at perihelion and to Mars at aphelion, and if our orbit were in resonance with either of those planets, the earth would be tugged by Venus (say) at the same point in its orbit, which would cause our orbit to stretch further and become more eccentric. As our orbit stretched, the effects of Venus and Mars stretching our orbit would increase (unless they counterbalanced each other), increasing our chance of eventually crashing into one or the other, or theirs of crashing into us. This didn't happen, which implies that whatever effects the other planets are having on our orbit are about balancing out (and a good thing, too), keeping us in our place.
More Questions & Answers...