Santa

What happens if you keep on going UP in outer space? North Pole lift off and keep on going up?

Does my question make sense? Like instead of going "left" towards Venus or "right" towards Mars what happens if you lift off at the North Pole and keep on going up? Where would one end up?

Public Comments

1. The further you are from the Earth, the smaller the escape velocity. For instance, at the distance of the moon it is down to 1.4 km/sec. If you keep climbing at 50 mph, you eventually reach a height where the escape velocity is less than 50 mph. At which point you could shut your engine off and continue away from the Earth forever without ever having the reach the 11 km/s escape velocity needed from the surface of the Earth. Of course, you will burn a lot more fuel reaching that distance at 50 mph than you would if you just accelerated up to 11 km/sec right at the start
2. I'd guess you'd probably run into something eventually, depending on the position of the Earth in its orbit and the sun in our galaxy. Of course, what that "something" might be would be anyone's guess, and I'd guess that anything would likely be many light years away. So for the span of a human lifetime, you'd probably end up nowhere in particular.
3. First, a little explanation about directions. "up" means away from the Earth in any direction. Venus and Mars are left and right of the Earth only in diagrams showing the distance the Sun. All the planets are in constant motion around the Sun and are never actually lined up like that. Anyway to answer your question... If you lift off from the North Pole and keep going, you will leave the solar system. If you look back at the solar system it will look something like this: http://www.thegraceacademy.org/marketing/media/solar_system1.jpg However, the planets are placed close together in the picture so that they fit. They are actually much farther from each other and from the Sun than drawn, and they move around the Sun along those lines. There are no lines in space either. If you keep going, you will leave the Milky Way galaxy. If you look back it will look something like this: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/20080603a.html If you keep going, you won't end up anywhere except in the middle of outer space. It will look something like this: http://www.wendelstein-observatorium.de:8002/astropics/perseus.jpg
4. First of all, by launching from the North Pole, you would be wasting a lot of unnecessary fuel just to escape earth's gravitational pull. There are two reasons for this. The earth "bulges" at the equator and is slightly flattened at the poles. (It's an oblate spheriod, not a perfect sphere). So your distance from the center of earth's gravity at the pole is closer, and so escape velocity is slightly greater. Also, the rotation of the earth (spin on it's axis) can give you added velocity, making it easier to reach escape velocity from areas farther away from the poles, where you aren't really "moving" with the planet's rotation in a circular pattern, but more or less just spinning in place. Okay, let's say you were, however, going to lift off from the north pole, and go "straight up" forever. Eventually, long after your death, your craft would pass by pretty close to Polaris (the north star) since that was the direction you were headed at liftoff. Except for, the fact that, by the time your craft would get there, that star would probably have moved along in it's orbit around the galactic center by quite a ways. Chances are, you might come across some debris, say, at the outer edges of the solar system, but you would not encounter any planets in our solar system, they just don't orbit our sun in that plane. Perhaps a few comets, assuming you could keep yourself alive long enough for it to be relevant. But, as far as where you would "end up" it's quite possible you would never reach a final destination. Eventually, some object with mass would have the gravity to pull you into orbit around it, or even into it, but essentially, you would continue along your trajectory indefinitely until something (such as gravitational perturbations) altered your course. (Think of Isaac Newton, and a body that is in motion).
5. There is no "up" in outer space...the term only makes sense when you are in the gravitational field of a planet. I think what you are asking is what happens if you travel at right angles to the plane of the solar system. You would end up in interstellar space in the direction of the North Celestial Pole. This is no different that interstellar space in any other direction.
6. Up is only relative to where you want up to be relative to. If you were to lift off from the the North Pole and kept going up then one could say that they did go straight up in relation to he North pole and you could keep going if you were to say that. But to keep going upwards would be the exact same thing sameat going off in everyother direction. Regardless of thre direction that you go you would conitnue to go in the dirction forever as the Universe is expanding at the speed of regardless of ther direction that you were too use.