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if i bored a hole through the earth[i know thats not possible]?
hypathetical .,i need to understand gravity,bored a hole all the way through the earth and jumped into it ,would i come out the other side ,what would happen?
7 Answers
- JSintheStatesLv 41 decade agoFavorite Answer
Assuming you're in the U.S., if you get a globe you'll see that straight through the Earth puts you in Australia! Now, let's construct a super-force field tunnel so we don't deal with the heat of the core of the Earth. You jump into the tunnel and start accelerating, until you reach the very center of the planet. Now I'm not going to work out the velocity (but you accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2). And you're travelling very fast when to get to the center, and you keep going... but now you'll start to decelerate until you get to, or almost get to Australia. And then you start falling back towards the U.S.
And additionally, I'm ignoring air friction, which will slow you down tremendously. I believe terminal velocity for a person is about 120 mph in our atmosphere. Anyway, this is suppose to help you, although I've given you a lot of things to investigate and look-up! Fun problem!
Source(s): I teach HS physics! - campbelp2002Lv 71 decade ago
Ignoring air resistance and all kinds of other practical considerations, you fall, speeding up as you fall, but your rate of speeding up your fall decreases as you near the center, then you start rising up the other side, slowing down all the time, and your rate of slowing down increases as you get farther from the center, until you rise up just barely to the top of the hole on the other side, pause an instant, then fall back again. You oscillate back and forth forever. The period of oscillation is the same as an orbit, 90 minutes for one round trip. This is because gravity decreases linearly toward the center of the solid Earth, as there is less and less mass below you, meaning closer to the center than you. All the mass above you pulling in different directions cancels itself out. Gravity inside a hollow sphere, no matter how think the shell is, is zero.
In reality, air resistance slows you so much that it takes many hours to fall all the way to the center. You never make it much past the center; air resistance stops you completely and you hover weightless in the center. This ignores problems of heat of Earth's core and the problems drilling the hole and keeping the sides from collapsing and not hitting the sides as you fall.
- Randy PLv 71 decade ago
Standard sophomore-level physics problem. You would oscillate back and forth between the two ends of the hole with a period of about 42 minutes. It's actually a pretty simple calculation.
- Dean LLv 41 decade ago
you would fall threw just past the center then the gravity would such you back again kind of a yo-yo effect till you stopped but the thing is the pressure would compress you into a minute blob of nothing but the heat would vaporise you before you got that far ...
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- 1 decade ago
You would probably fall into the center of the Earth, and you would probably melt.