1.62 m/s²

No. As you get farther away from a gravitational body such as the sun or the earth (i.e. as your distance r increases), its gravitational effect on you weakens but never goes completely away; at least according to Newton’s law of gravity. …

Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician and mathematician and physicist who lived from 1642-1727. The legend is that Newton discovered Gravity when he saw a falling apple while thinking about the forces of nature.

The drag pressure across the surface area of the fabric is enough to slow descent to a safe speed. On the moon, there is no atmosphere — and therefore no aerodynamic drag to slow the fall of high surface area objects. If you were to use a parachute on the moon, you’d end up looking pretty silly and possibly broken.

If Earth had two moons, it would be catastrophic. An extra moon would lead to larger tides and wipe out major cities like New York and Singapore.

Meanwhile, the orbits of the planets in our solar system would be thrown into complete chaos. Our planets have stable orbits because they orbit a single massive body, the sun. With three suns, and three massive points in space constantly changing their positions, all of these orbits would be disrupted.

The sun’s gravitational tug then destabilized the smaller moon’s orbit and caused it to fall into its larger sibling. Though not very energetic, the collision would have ejected trillions of tons of lunar debris into space, obscuring both moons for several days.

If the planet somehow survived and punched its way to the centre of the Sun, then much less energy would be deposited in the convection zone and the effects would be lessened. On longer timescales the Sun would settle back down to the main sequence, with a radius and luminosity only slightly bigger than it was before.

Astronomers from the Catalina Sky Survey yesterday announced they’d found a second natural satellite orbiting the Earth. It looks like our planet and its long-standing partner Luna have decided to explore polyamory.

Cruithne is in a normal elliptic orbit around the Sun. This is why Cruithne is sometimes called “Earth’s second moon”. However, it does not orbit the Earth and is not a moon. In 2058, Cruithne will come within 0.09 AU (13.6 million kilometres or 8.5 million miles) of Mars.

Earth has one moon, and there are more than 200 moons in our solar system. Most of the major planets – all except Mercury and Venus – have moons. Pluto and some other dwarf planets, as well as many asteroids, also have small moons.

We are not getting closer to the sun, but scientists have shown that the distance between the sun and the Earth is changing. The sun’s weaker gravity as it loses mass causes the Earth to slowly move away from it. The movement away from the sun is microscopic (about 15 cm each year).

About an hour after sunset on June 18, 1178, the Moon exploded. That’s what it looked like to five terrified, awestruck monks watching the skies over the abbey at Canterbury, in southeastern England, anyway.

Scientists have found water ice in the cold, permanently shadowed craters at the Moon’s poles. Water molecules are also in the extremely thin lunar atmosphere.

The Moon will swing ever closer to Earth until it reaches a point 11,470 miles (18,470 kilometers) above our planet, a point termed the Roche limit. Theory dictates they’ll eventually rain down onto Earth’s surface.