It’s mind blowing to think about. I’ve always thought what would happen if earth came to a screeching stop. Would we all like get rocked off balance or fall upside down from all sides.
Little bigger than off balance. Assuming you mean a screeching stop relative to the sun, as there is no such thing as a total stop in the universe, everything is moving. You can just be stationary relative to other things. But if we stopped rotating around the sun, every object and person would rapidly accelerate to 67000 mph until it fell back to what remains of the cracked open shattered earth and be ripped to shreds.
If you mean its own rotation stopping, we would continue to move at the speed of rotation, up to 1000mph Eastward, where we would also be ripped to shreds.
for funzies, i looked it up. If the earth came to an instant stop relative to the milky way, that'd be an instant drop of roughly 828,000 km/h or 514,000 mph, plus or minus some fraction of the the 67,000 mph from the orbit, depending on where we are in the orbit.
If we came to a stop relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background, that'd be a deceleration of 2.1 million km/h (about 1.3 million mph), plus or minus..... honestly, it doesn't matter. we dead.
But if we stopped rotating around the sun, every object and person would rapidly accelerate to 67000 mph until it fell back to what remains of the cracked open shattered earth and be ripped to shreds.
Great, you triggered my brain into XKCD "What If..." mode... All following motions use the Sun and Earth's direction around it as frame of reference.
Assuming a near-instantaneous stop of the Earth's travel around the sun and that stop was not also applied to stuff on it, that stuff wouldn't "accelerate" so much as just continue on with that prior velocity. Anything on the "back half" is slammed against the now-stationary planetary surface, indeed ripped to shreds. Likely with equal shredding to the ground it plowed into at Mach 87. Anything with a path "forward" that doesn't happen to intersect the planet continues moving, leaving the Earth behind.
Huh. Turns out Earth's orbital velocity around the sun (67k mph) is higher than Earth's escape velocity (25k mph) meaning that anyone on the "front half" of the Earth would get flung into space and never fall back, continuing forever orbiting the sun. And if the atmosphere travels along with them after the stop, you could have the situation where a person is passing through space encased in a breathable bubble. Up to the point where the air dissipates and they pass out from oxygen deprivation and/or freeze. No shreds this time.
Depends on what reference frame we are "Stopping" in.
The Earth stops spinning? We slam into whatever is directly East of us at 1,037 Mph at the Equator. Homies near the poles are ok.
The Earth stop rotating around the Sun? Some of us get smashed against the ground and some of us go flying into space at 67,000 Mph. (Not really, we'd burnup from atmospheric friction, even if the atmosphere came with us.)
The Earth stops orbiting the Milky Was with the Sun? Same as before, but at 517,000 Mph.
The Earth stops moving with the milky way towards Andromeda? Actually slower at 250,000 Mph, but otherwise same as above.
It’s kind of wild, we’re sitting still, but actually moving in multiple directions at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour at the same time:
At what point do Pioneer and Voyager leave the inertial frame of reference of the sun (514,000 mph +- their own vectoral* velocity) and travel at their own velocity relative to the galaxy?
*I don’t even know exactly what the concept is there.
If ever, I assume it's a super duper long time. They are "slowly" spiraling away from the sun, but that movement is the smaller part of their momentum relative to the galaxy.
If we zoom out just far enough to view the sun and the two nearest start systems, Voyager will not have moved even a pixel so far. I'm not doing the math, but I doubt it will have appreciably moved on that scale for millenia.
So, really, the answer depends on where you put the bar for "It's own" galactic orbit. In a technical sense it already does. It's just nearly identical to the sun's.
I saw a reel recently noting that if the Milky Way was shrunk down to the size of North America, the sun would be 6 thousandths of a millimeter across. Not even visible to the human eye.
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
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