Question

If the moon attracts the earth why does the earth not move towards the moon? How? ​

Answer 1

Answer:

t actually does!

The law of universal gravitation says: every mass attracts every other mass in the universe, and the gravitational force between two bodies is proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Accordingly, the Earth and the Moon do attract each other.

Explanation:

Earth is 81 times more massive than the Moon and the distance between the two is 385,000 kilometers, center-to-center.

According to Newton's Third Law of Motion, if the Earth exerts a force on the Moon, the Moon must exert an equal and opposite force on the Earth, but that does not mean that the effects of those equal forces are the same, because the masses of the two objects are different. A given force will affect Earth’s motion 81 times less than it would the Moon.

The most evident effect of the Earth's pull is that the Moon orbits the Earth once in 27 days in an elliptical path at a distance of about 385,000 kilometers. The most evident effect of the Moon’s pull is, it causes the oceans to bulge out in the direction of the moon. What is not so evident is that the Earth also "orbits" the Moon every 27 days, with an elliptical path 81 times smaller than that of the Moon, at a distance of 4,800 kilometers. However, since two bodies cannot really 'orbit' each other, they both orbit a common point known as the barycenter with an orbital path that is ~4,800 kilometers for the Earth, and ~385,000 kilometers for the Moon. The distance is from center to center - so, the barycenter is located within the Earth - at about 1,700 kilometers below the surface of the Earth.