Good question. When the solar system formed, gravity was spinning it around like you on a merry-go-round. Eventually gravity brought clumps together to form the Sun, Earth, and the rest of the planets. After these were all created, we were still spinning, due to something called Angular Momentum, which keeps up moving in a circle. This creates a force which counter-acts the Sun pulling on us via gravity and keeps us in a stable orbit around the Sun. It is very similar to how you stay on a merry-go-round. It spins and pushes you out, but you are also moving fast and have a force acting towards the center to keep you on. If you didn’t have this force, you’d fly off 🙂
What causes gravity is a big question. In short, we don’t know. There are various theories as to what it is. Particle Physicists believe that gravity is actually a particle called the graviton. This is thought because of the Standard Model of Physics. The Standard model is a table of all of the base sub-atomic particles. All but one of these particles has been discovered. The only one missing is the elusive Higgs Boson, which is the subject of search at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. The Higgs gives particles its mass. Other bosons in the standard model give particles their charge, spin and other properties. There are also particles that are the force carries (such as the nuclear strong force and electromagnetism-weak force). As such, if there is a particle that should give other particles its mass and force particles, gravity should also exist in the same way. However there is no evidence that gravity is a particle (everything else has been discovered so we know it is).
Good question. When the solar system formed, gravity was spinning it around like you on a merry-go-round. Eventually gravity brought clumps together to form the Sun, Earth, and the rest of the planets. After these were all created, we were still spinning, due to something called Angular Momentum, which keeps up moving in a circle. This creates a force which counter-acts the Sun pulling on us via gravity and keeps us in a stable orbit around the Sun. It is very similar to how you stay on a merry-go-round. It spins and pushes you out, but you are also moving fast and have a force acting towards the center to keep you on. If you didn’t have this force, you’d fly off 🙂
What causes gravity is a big question. In short, we don’t know. There are various theories as to what it is. Particle Physicists believe that gravity is actually a particle called the graviton. This is thought because of the Standard Model of Physics. The Standard model is a table of all of the base sub-atomic particles. All but one of these particles has been discovered. The only one missing is the elusive Higgs Boson, which is the subject of search at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. The Higgs gives particles its mass. Other bosons in the standard model give particles their charge, spin and other properties. There are also particles that are the force carries (such as the nuclear strong force and electromagnetism-weak force). As such, if there is a particle that should give other particles its mass and force particles, gravity should also exist in the same way. However there is no evidence that gravity is a particle (everything else has been discovered so we know it is).
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