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accelerate towards the center of the Earth if it were possible? How fast would an object be traveling by the time it arrived there?
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Discounting air resistance or other friction, I believe it is the same as the escape velocity -- about 7 miles per second. I didn't do any math on this. I just answered from the top of my head, but here's a link...
[http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae158.cfm]www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae158.cfm
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Isn't escape velocity 9.8 m/s?
The MiniTruth passed its first act #001, comname: PATRIOT ACT on October 26, 2001.
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Uh, no - 9.8 m/s^2 is the acceleration due to gravity at sea level. If that were the excape velocity, the average person would be able to throw a baseball into orbit.
I also don't know the escape velocity off the top of my head but I want to say that escape velocity is something like 11-12 km/s.
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Its about 11,500 meters per second... since the Earth is a >1000C furnace a mere ten or twenty miles under our feet of liquid rock, iron, nickle, etc... why would this help?
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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Whatever speed the object reached by the Earths' center point it would then decrease as is moved away from that point. Without doing the maths its hard to gauge exactly, however I'm of the opinion that it would decrease in velocity enough that the object would not escape from the Earths gravitational field once past the center point. In my head I can almost see an object flying backwards and forwards through the Earths center point with less distance travelled each time until it came to rest at the center - though by that time the heat would have built up enough to destroy the object.
There was a young lady named Bright.
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day
in a relative way
And returned on the previous night.
--Arthur Buller--
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Assuming a hole straight through the Earth, the object would swing back and forth contunously, like a pendulum. They only thing that would slow it down and eventually stop it would be atmospheric friction.
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The centre of the Earth is the only place where there is NO gravity, understanding the earth would be wonderous although nothing we can construct today would every be able to withstand the forces a few Km below our earths crust, so much pressure, hot and too powerful. When dropping something down we would aslo consider terminal velocity, a drag or friction which slows down the falling object. Unless like other have said we could burrow or build a hole straight through the Earth
'first steps are not for cheap, think about it...
did China build a great Wall in a day ?' ( Y L R newmars forum member )
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Actually, someone recently proposed a method for getting a probe to the Earth's core. Basically, you take a year's worth of global iron production, heat it up to 10,000 degrees C, put some sort of super heat-shielded sensor package with cryogenic cooling and drop it.
The mass of iron is hot enough to melt through rock like butter and dense enough to sink most of the way to Earth's core. Of course, there's about 1000 different reasons this wouldn't work but it is theoretically possible.
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