I was wondering how long it would take for the Earth and Sun to crash into each other via gravitational force, if the Earth suddenly stopped orbiting around the sun. Instead of the Earth's forward motion balancing out with the centripetal force from the sun to create a curved orbit, it is instead just pulled towards the sun in a straight line.
This is not as simple as putting the values into the Universal Gravitation Formula, since distance between the Earth and Sun would be constantly changing. Because of this continual change in distance, I figured calculus is needed. Since I don't know calculus, I wrote a program that re-evaluates the distance between the Earth and the Sun after every second. It gives me an answer of roughly 65 days for the Earth to reach the Sun.
My question: can anyone who knows calculus please figure out how long the Earth and Sun would take to reach each other via gravitational force if the Earth stopped orbiting? I just want to know if the answer my computer program gave me is mostly accurate.
