Question

Is earth’s orbital speed constant?

Answer 1

Hint: We know that earth undergoes two types of motion, namely the rotation about its axis and the revolution around the sun in a fixed path called the orbits. We also know that the rotation and the revolution of the earth gives rise to various factors like the day-night cycles, climate or season cycles and also the tides.

Complete answer:
As, orbital speed is defined as the speed at which any object of some mass ‘m’ moves around another massive object ‘M’ due to the influence of gravity.
Clearly, since the earth and the sun are attracted by the gravitational force, the mass of the sun is greater than the mass of the earth. Then we can say that the revolution of earth around the sun in a fixed path, called orbits is due to the speed called orbital speed.
We know that the revolution of the earth around the sun in its orbits takes 365.25 days. This accounts for the number of days in a year and is clearly a fixed number. Also, since the trajectory of the earth or the orbit of the earth is fixed, we can say the speed at which the earth revolves around the sun is given by the orbital speed of the earth.
Since both time and distance are constant, we can conclude that the orbital speed of the earth is also a constant.

Note:
Since all the planets and the sun experience a gravitational force between them, and all the planets revolve around the sun at a fixed orbit, we can say that all the planets experience orbital speed. However, the orbital speed of different planets will be different.