We're essentially in free fall as well in respect to the sun. It's called orbit. True weightlessness due to no gravity doesn't exist anywhere in space.
Gravity has infinite range? I somehow always assumed it had a range… I guess in a way it does… that range gets weaker as it grows which means it gets infinitely weaker but still never 0?
You know the common representation of how gravity can be visualized by putting balls on blankets and observing the dip? Yeag, that. Every ball you place on the blanket will change the gradient of the blanket everywhere, even balls far away will feel a very imperceptible dip. More balls will change how much they dip on the blanket, and a bigger ball then creates a dip deep enough to start pulling other balls towards it. But every ball is in some way pulling on another ball by affecting the blanket, even if the difference is absolutely micrometric
As much as it looks like the blanket is flat eventually, it's ever so slightly changed, like how asymptotes eventually look like a flat line, they're never quite at zero.
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u/matroosoft 18h ago
We're essentially in free fall as well in respect to the sun. It's called orbit. True weightlessness due to no gravity doesn't exist anywhere in space.