High School Does matter accumulate in Earth's gravity well?

[Ibix]

Not what I exactly meant, but isn't it deepest around Antarctica?

The Earth is not sitting on a dent in a rubber sheet, if you've been misled by diagrams of that sort.

 

[Janus]

Not what I exactly meant, but isn't it deepest around Antarctica?

No.
I know that they usually depict a spherical Earth and Sun sitting in their respective dips representing the Gravity wells , but that is just artistic license and not representative of what the model is showing.
The warped grid lines are a 2-dimensional model of the 3-d universe. It is simplified to make a it easier to visualize. A more accurate way to represent the Earth and Sun in keeping with the model would be as circles on the grid, the circles representing the surface of each. That part of the grid inside each circle would be points under the surface of each body, with the "lowest" part of each well being at the center of the body.

 

[DaveC426913]

Not what I exactly meant, but isn't it deepest around Antarctica?

Visualizing gravitational curvature...

(2D) wrong:

(3D) better:

The deepest part of the well is at the centre of the Earth, and the curvature extends spherically and 3-dimensionally symmetrical in all directions from the centre.But no mere diagram can really capture what's happening, even the above one. You really need to read up a little on it. It's not that hard to get your head around.

 

[Drakkith]

Not what I exactly meant, but isn't it deepest around Antarctica?

Here's what I want you to do, TimeSkip. I want you to go onto the Steam platform (or download it if you don't have it yet) and purchase Kerbal Space Program. I want you to spend about 100 hours in this game building and flying spacecraft around the solar system. Not only is this a lot of fun (at least for me), but it will greatly increase your understanding of orbital mechanics and gravity. There are many resources on youtube to help you get off the ground and into orbit if you're having trouble.

If you don't want to do that, then just know that gravity isn't a 2d sheet that everything sits on. It's much more like the 2nd diagram in Dave's post just above. Note that the lines don't represent anything physical. They just represent the concept of curved spacetime in the vicinity of a massive object.

 

[Drakkith]

I would like to understand if matter accumulates into the gravity well of the Earth?

No, it does not. In general, objects falling towards the Earth that don't collide with the planet simply swing around and leave at the same velocity that they came in at. They only get 'captured' if they interact with a 2nd object, perhaps the Moon, that can alter their orbit in such a way as to be stable around the Earth.

For dust and gas particles, they can also collide with other gas and dust particles and lose enough energy to be captured, but additional collisions or interactions with sunlight, cosmic rays, the solar wind, and other effects typically don't allow them to accumulate around the Earth. They tend to either fall into the Earth's atmosphere or be ejected.

 

[TimeSkip]

I got it now, I've been misled my whole life in thinking in a Cartesian plane.

One other question, as the OP originated from a question about entanglement in QM.

Is the plane on which a QM entanglement occurring always planar to the other entangled state? Possibly better stated in Hilbert space?

 

[DaveC426913]

Is the plane on which a QM entanglement occurring always planar to the other entangled state? Possibly better stated in Hilbert space?

Totally unrelated.

New question = new thread. And it should be posted in the Quantum Physics forum.

 

[Janus]

Visualizing gravitational curvature...

(2D) wrong:
View attachment 278911

(3D) better:
View attachment 278909
The deepest part of the well is at the centre of the Earth, and the curvature extends spherically and 3-dimensionally symmetrical in all directions from the centre.But no mere diagram can really capture what's happening, even the above one. You really need to read up a little on it. It's not that hard to get your head around.

The second image starting me wondering if I could go one better. Here's what I ended up with; the 3D representation of a gravity well as an animation with the Earth entering from the right of the frame and exiting to the left. I looped it 4 times for the YouTube video.
https://youtu.be/5Ye3MJ7czYg

 

[stefan r]

Source please?
Source please?

I have never been to Antarctica. I did watch a nice documentary called "march of the penguins" with my wife a few years ago. The video footage of the penguins huddling in the dark included some shots of intense Aurorae. I'm not sure but I somehow got the impression that the aurorae were used as the light source for some of the penguin documentation. There were also direct photos of the sky with aurorae. No way to tell how frequently it occurs since a photographer hanging out with penguins in the dark probably does not have a whole lot of alternatives to photographing an aurora.

Quick youtube search has this time lapse video. Obviously could be cherry picking. The implication is that Antarctica has aurora all night long and it is typically brighter than the Milky Way.

Canadians never see the Aurora Australis. Australians never see the Aurora Borealis.