Question: Why does the Earth move around the sun?

Marisol Collins answered on 16 Nov 2016:

Great question! I had to do a bit of research to answer this for you, as it is not an area of science I know much about, but learning is fun, right?

I find it amazing that even though we can be standing still, we are always moving, as the Earth and other planets spin on their own axis and move around the sun 🙂

Originally, scientists used to think that the sun, moon and planets used to move around the Earth, but they were wrong! In wasn’t until around 500 years ago that scientists, in particular one called Copernicus, really discovered that the sun was at the centre of our solar system.

But why does this happen? For this we have to look much, much earlier, around 4.6 billion years ago, when our solar system was probably just a massive cloud of hydrogen gas left over from the Big Bang (the huge event that we think led to the birth of the Universe). Scientists think that another big explosion in the hydrogen cloud made all the particles start to spin, and eventually, under the weight of gravity they started to clump together and spin faster and faster. As it collapsed further and further under gravity and spun even faster, the giant ball of gas at the centre became the sun, and all the material spinning around it clumped together more and more to form planets. Where we are now in time, the size and speed that the planets are in balance as they rotate around the sun, including the Earth. I’m sure that Astronomers could explain it better than I have, but it looks like this is how we on Earth came to spin round the sun! I never knew this before, so thank you for asking the question and helping me to learn too!

Marisol 🙂