Question: how does the earth stay in the same place in space

Rosie Coates answered on 17 Mar 2014:

Well, the earth doesn’t really stay in the same place in the sky…. It orbits around the sun whilst spinning on it’s axis. The earth’s axis runs from the north pole to the south pole and it takes around 24 hours for the earth to spin once on it’s axis. The earths orbit takes it in a squashed circle around the sun at a constant speed; the earth will circle the sun once every 365.24 days (the 0.24 of a day probably explains why we have a leap year every 4 years….).

The thing keeping the earth in it’s orbit around the sun is the gravitational pull of the sun on the earth. This is the same reason that all of the other planets stay in their orbit around the sun too. The planets orbit the sun because the sun is the heavier object an so it exerts the pull of gravity on the planets and not the other way around.

The reason that the earth doesn’t just go plunging into the fiery sun and burn up is that the earth is also moving sideways at the same time as being pulled towards the sun. The combination of these two directional pulls on the earth means that is ends up spinning round and round the sun- hopefully forever!