There’s been plenty of explanations already, but here’s a perspective I think can help:
Your original intuition is entirely correct for an object that appeared next to earth but which isn’t moving relative to the sun. It would fall straight in with very little trouble. If it’s moving a little sideways then it’d need to be nudged to make sure it didn’t miss the sun.
But the Earth is moving super fast sideways, so an object coming from Earth would need to be nudged a lot to not kiss the sun.
The sun creates a big gravity well. The earth happens to be quite close to the top of this well (because of the inverse square low). It takes about the same energy to go down and up the gravitational well.
if your object has just enough velocity to escape Earth’s gravity, it’ll begin orbiting the Sun, it won’t fall directly towards it.
I’m going to oversimplify this : if you want your object to hit the sun after leaving the Earth, it has to have the velocity of the Earth (30 km/s) but in the opposite direction of it’s orbit around the Sun.
you also should take into account the massive distance between us anl the Sun (150 million km). so you have to aim properly, otherwise your object is gonna enter a very elliptical orbit
dV also called delta V is the change in velocity required. Higher means more fuel is required and so making the rocket is harder.
The earth orbits the sun at a very high speed and so to get to a planet much further inward requires slowing down a lot.
You can look up escape velocity which is the velocity required to exit a gravitational body completely.
Fun fact: The sun is the hardest place to get to in the solar system. It’s less dV to leave entirely than to get to Mercury
can you explain why? cuz that doesnt make sense to me
The solar system is doing this
Which makes you go like this
And while it’s possible to make your way towards the center, it’s difficult
And this requires less work
Dudes been waiting for a reason to use these lol
Please consider becoming a science teacher.
Might have to move to a different country if in the US. But I agree.
Fuck. Is that you, Kyle Hill?
Is Kyle Hill on Lemmy? Somebody ask him next stream!
There’s been plenty of explanations already, but here’s a perspective I think can help:
Your original intuition is entirely correct for an object that appeared next to earth but which isn’t moving relative to the sun. It would fall straight in with very little trouble. If it’s moving a little sideways then it’d need to be nudged to make sure it didn’t miss the sun.
But the Earth is moving super fast sideways, so an object coming from Earth would need to be nudged a lot to not kiss the sun.
The earth is going around the sun pretty fast, and you need to counteract that speed to get to the sun.
But when you’re leaving you can use the earths orbital velocity to give you a boost.
https://xkcd.com/681_large/
The sun creates a big gravity well. The earth happens to be quite close to the top of this well (because of the inverse square low). It takes about the same energy to go down and up the gravitational well.
if your object has just enough velocity to escape Earth’s gravity, it’ll begin orbiting the Sun, it won’t fall directly towards it.
I’m going to oversimplify this : if you want your object to hit the sun after leaving the Earth, it has to have the velocity of the Earth (30 km/s) but in the opposite direction of it’s orbit around the Sun.
you also should take into account the massive distance between us anl the Sun (150 million km). so you have to aim properly, otherwise your object is gonna enter a very elliptical orbit
dV also called delta V is the change in velocity required. Higher means more fuel is required and so making the rocket is harder. The earth orbits the sun at a very high speed and so to get to a planet much further inward requires slowing down a lot. You can look up escape velocity which is the velocity required to exit a gravitational body completely.
Yeah, when I starter playing Kerbal I figured jt’d be super easy, but I forgot that the planets are moving FAST.