• Question: could stars come crashing down and destroy the earth?

    Asked by farrarc01 to Adam, Catherine, Leila, Nazim on 22 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 22 Mar 2012:

      In space, there is no *down*, which kind of freaks me out!

      Things are attracted to each other by gravity, the strength of which depends on how big your star or planet is; how much mass it has. So the earth is bigger than us, so its gravity sticks us to its surface.

      But stars are much bigger than the Earth, so they have a much bigger gravity. It’s why we orbit around the sun, because we are moving sideways, but the sun’s gravity has caught us and now we’re just going round and round.

      Each star has its own gravity, but all the stars are so far away from each other and from other planets and things, that they don’t have any effect on eachother. They’re not going anywhere 🙂

    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 22 Mar 2012:

      If a star ever came close enough for that to happen (which it wouldn’t), we would actually go crashing down into the star! Stars are much bigger than Earth so you would have to adjust your viewpoint.

      But actually what would probably happen is that the star and the sun would go into a complex binary orbit (we see lots of binary stars in the universe) and the Earth would somehow orbit the two together! It would be a bit weird, but we probably wouldn’t hit either one.

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