Why does the moon go around the earth rather than the sun?
This is a good question, especially since the sun pulls on the moon more than twice as hard as the earth does! Sun’s pull on moon: 4.26 × 10^20 N Earth’s pull on moon: 1.93 × 10^20 N The answer is that the moon actually does orbit the sun. If you look at a trace of the moon’s orbit over the course of a year, you’ll see that it traces out a near circle around the sun, but the circle follows a kind of wavy pattern as the moon moves alternately closer to and farther from the sun (compared to the earth’s orbit), every two weeks. From our point of view, the moon is going around us. From the sun’s point of view, both the earth an the moon are going around it, with the moon’s path being a little wigglier on account of the influence of the earth’s gravity.
Actually the earth and moon are both orbiting the sun, it’s just that they are gravitationally bound together as planet and moon, so they go around the sun together. Current theory is that the moon was created when another planet collided with the early earth. The moon formed from a ring of debris that flew off from this collision.
