Question #efecf
1 Answer
@Aegis, That's a good question.
You are absolutely spot-on, indeed it will rotate about the earth just the way earth revolves around the sun.
You see earth is actually in a state of free fall, but what prevents its from falling into the sun is its tangential velocity. You could think it this way if there wasn't any force at all on earth earth would have zoomed off tangentially and that's exactly what happens, every time earth tries to escape in the tangential direction the sun's gravitational field pulls it back in, so its not that "something" is keeping earth from falling in ,rather its sun's attraction that's keeping earth from escaping.
So every time it escapes a bit sun pulls it towards itself and this goes on If you observe lets say a stone being whirled around using a rope you should be able to observe the fact that you experience a force and that is the force thats preventing the stone from zooming of your hands this is what is called as the "Centripetal Force" . Any rotating object must have something that applies this force on it to prevent it from escaping.And in case of your bullet earth will do that job.
And you are absolutely right about the bullet, at a given distance from the earth if you fire the bullet within a "specific range" of velocities it will revolve the earth in the same way earth revolves around the sun, you don't want it going too fast otherwise it will escape earth's gravitational field and this is what is called the "Escape Velocity" .It's when a body has too much velocity and it earth's force is just not strong enough to hold it back.
