Why isn the Earths course altered by impact from meteors, comets ect…?
The Earth’s course is altered by EVERY impact no matter how small. The reason people don’t notice it is because the mass of the impactors are EXTREMELY small compared to the mass of the Earth and so the amount of course deviation is far too tiny to measure. In this age of air travel the world seems small and it is difficult to get an intuitive feeling of the tremendous mass of the Earth. .
It’s because the sun is so massive and thus it’s very large gravitational pull. Even if something the size of the earth smashed into us and disintigrated the planet, the resulting pieces would still orbit the sun in pretty well the same orbit as now. To get us really off course, it would take something bigger than the sun to come by and give us a new body to orbit or somehow exerting a force on the earth sufficient to reach the escape velocity of the sun’s gravitational pull which I googled to be 42km/s. That sounds like a pretty difficult task. So I would suspect that whatever is orbiting the sun now will stay that way (and in the same orbit) until the sun loses its mass.
