Table of Contents
- 1 How do scientists know the Earth is spinning?
- 2 What causes objects to accelerate downward?
- 3 What would happen if you throw a ball straight up in the air without gravity?
- 4 What causes objects to fall towards Earth?
- 5 What would happen if the Earth’s center of gravity was tilted?
- 6 What would travel look like in a flat Earth?
How do scientists know the Earth is spinning?
Scientists use the movement of pendulums to provide evidence that the Earth is rotating. A pendulum is a weight hanging from a fixed point so that it can swing freely back and forth. When you move the base of the pendulum, the weight continues to travel in the same path.
What causes objects to accelerate downward?
Gravity causes objects to accelerate downward, whereas air resistance acts in the direction opposite to the motion and reduces acceleration. Terminal velocity is the constant velocity of a falling object when the force of air resistance equals the force of gravity.
What would happen if you fell into a hole that went through the center of the Earth?
As you approached the center of the earth the pull of gravity would decline and eventually (at the center) cease, but inertia would keep you going. Once past center, though, the pull of the earth’s mass behind you would begin to slow you down, at exactly the opposite rate that you’d accelerated.
How long would it take for you to fall to the center of the Earth?
42 minutes
The acceleration of gravity is 9.8m/s2 and the radius of the Earth is 6.378 million meters. This means that you would fall through the entire Earth in only 42 minutes! Can you imagine traveling 8 thousand miles in less than an hour? You maximum velocity at the center would be roughly 8km/s (18,000 mph).
What would happen if you throw a ball straight up in the air without gravity?
If a ball is thrown straight up into the air, then on its way up the ball will move upward in a straight line and then descend once the velocity of the ball becomes zero. The speed of the ball with decrease on the way up until it hits zero and it will then fall back down.
What causes objects to fall towards Earth?
The answer is gravity: an invisible force that pulls objects toward each other. Earth’s gravity is what keeps you on the ground and what makes things fall. Anything that has mass also has gravity.
What causes falling objects to fall?
The force of gravity causes objects to fall toward the center of Earth. The acceleration of free-falling objects is therefore called the acceleration due to gravity. The direction of the acceleration due to gravity is downward (towards the center of Earth).
Does gravity pull down on a flat Earth?
People who believe in a flat Earth assume that gravity would pull straight down, but there’s no evidence to suggest it would work that way. What we know about gravity suggests it would pull toward the center of the disk. That means it would only pull straight down at one point on the center of the disk.
What would happen if the Earth’s center of gravity was tilted?
As you got increasingly far from the center, gravity would tug more and more horizontally. This would have some strange impacts, like sucking all the water toward the center of the world, and making trees and plants grow diagonally, since they develop in the opposite direction of gravity’s pull.
What would travel look like in a flat Earth?
Perhaps one of the most glaring oddities is that the proposed map of the flat Earth is totally different. It places the Arctic at the center while Antarctica forms an “ice wall” around the edges. In such a world, travel would look very different.
Why aren’t Shadows the same length on different sides of Earth?
Go outside and put two sticks that are the same length in the group. If the Earth was flat the shadows would be the same length, but they aren’t. Why? Because the Earth is round.