What happen to the moon if earth stopped exerting the force of gravity on it?

Answer 1

Well, honey, if Earth suddenly stopped exerting its gravitational force on the moon, that bad boy would just float off into space like a lost balloon at a birthday party. Gravity is what keeps the moon in orbit around Earth, so without it, the moon would go off on its own cosmic adventure. Just imagine the chaos of tides and werewolves without our trusty lunar sidekick!

Answer 2

The moon would immediately fall to Earth because the gravity from Earth is pulling down the moon but because of the centripetal force, it is making the moon orbit around the Earth. So, if the centripetal force was removed, the moon would fall into Earth.

Answer 3

If the Earth stopped exerting the force of gravity on the moon, it would slingshot away from the earth, but because of the gravitational pull of the sun, it would eventually settle into a stable orbit around the sun.

Answer 4

If inertia were to suddenly disappear then there would be nothing balancing out the force of gravity and the moon accelerate towards the surface of the earth in a straight line. Don't be concerned however, lacking all inertia the collision would be nothing.

Answer 5

If there were no gravity, then there would be no orbits. Everything in space
would just sail along at constant speed in a straight line, until it hit something.
Then it ... or every one of its pieces ... would take off along another straight line,
in a new direction and at a different constant speed.

The Moon would not orbit the Earth, and the Earth would not orbit the sun.

To be honest about it ... without gravity, there would be no Moon, Earth, or Sun.

Answer 6

FIRST, this can't happen. So you're asking for us to tell you what would happen if something that could't happen happened; you've got to be a little tolerant of vague answers.

I ran a few simulations using Universe Sandbox by deleting the Earth altogether (easier than figuring out how to specificially turn off the gravitational interaction between the Earth and Moon) and seeing what happened to the Moon, and the answer is "perhaps surprisingly, not really all that much".

SECOND, the Moon orbits the Earth, but it also orbits the Sun. Delete the Earth's gravitational pull and the Moon stays orbiting the Sun (the orbit is a bit different depending on exactly when you switch the Earth's gravity off, but in most cases it's going to be reasonably close to the orbit it has now, except without the "wobbles" it currently has because it's also circling the Earth).

THIRD, over the long term the Moon could wind up hitting the Earth (not because it got "pulled in" by Earth's gravity, just because they started at more or less the same place moving more or less the same direction at more or less the same speed, and when you have a situation like that it's not impossible that they could find themselves being in MORE rather than less the same place at some point in the future, even ignoring their mutual attraction).

FOURTH, though this is a lot harder to predict, the Moon is significantly less massive than Earth and therefore significantly more sensitive to minor perturbations in its orbit from the other planets (Jupiter especially; Jupiter is a lot further away than Venus or Mars, but it's also a LOT more massive than either of those ... even so, the pull from Jupiter will likely be at most a few hundredths of a percent of the pull from the Sun, even when the Moon and Jupiter are at their closest). The Moon's orbit around the Sun is stabilized by the Earth's pull; take that out of the picture, and in the long run it gets really hard to predict what might happen to the Moon.

Answer 7

It would take off in a straight line, and after a while, we would never see it again.

Answer 8

They would get pulled into the sun more quickly then they are now.

Answer 9

If there were no force acting on the moon, its momentum would cause it to fly off into space or possible into the sun if it were heading in that direction.