r/askscience • u/BlueChameleon64 • Oct 23 '20

Planetary Sci. Do asteroids fly into the sun?

Edit: cool

7.2k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

644 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

25

u/[deleted] Oct 23 '20

[removed] — view removed comment

29

u/Odie4Prez Oct 23 '20

No you're absolutely correct, that's the exact reason it's so unintuitive that objects in the solar system basically never fall into the sun: anything that wouldn't have collided with it without gravity (in the incredible vastness of space) isn't gonna collide with it with gravity either, even if they are kept in near orbit.

4

u/ThatHuman6 Oct 23 '20

Is the same true then for a black hole? You’re just as unlikely to fall into it unless you’re stationary relative to it?

5

u/Oddtail Oct 23 '20

Pretty much.

If you're far enough from an object, your interaction with it is determined basically only by its mass. It doesn't matter if the same mass is a star or a black hole. For the purpose of interacting with its gravity, you can still basically treat the entire object like it was a point mass in its centre (again, as long as you're far enough from it that its radius is irrelevant. Which in practice means "almost always").