Why don’t planets fall into the Sun?

The Sun is huge, and it pulls on everything near it with a force called gravity. So why doesn’t Earth fall in?

Because Earth is also racing sideways. It zooms along at about 30 kilometers every second!

Imagine swinging a ball on a string. The string pulls the ball in, but the ball keeps moving sideways, so it goes round in a circle. For a planet, gravity is the string.

Earth is always falling toward the Sun, but it is moving sideways so fast that it keeps missing. That path is called an orbit.

If a planet moved too slowly, it would fall in. If it moved too fast, it would fly off into space. Orbits only work with just the right speed.

Earth takes one whole year to go all the way around the Sun.