Your explanation is way better than my rambling answer I think. But just to nitpick a bit, 9.8 meters/second every second is the surface level acceleration, but since gravity weakens with distance and the edge of the gravity well is the furthest point from earth you could conceivably "drop" something and have it ever landing on earth, the initial acceleration would be incredibly slow. If we imagine a meteor that starts off static relative to earth and at the very limit of our gravity well it might be accelerated by a cm/year every year for the first few thousand years, and might take a million of years to actually hit. But when it hit it would do so at pretty much perfect escape velocity, and if it could pass through Earth it would just barely not escape our gravity well and would eventually fall back after another 2 million years.
Yeah, there's a lot of weird details here that can complicate things; I was going for a very basic answer. Even in the kind of case you're talking about, it's unlikely that the object would stay in a stable equilibrium--if it's really that close, perturbations from other objects' gravity would almost certainly kick it out of that cycle. The solar system is chaotic, and orbital dynamics get messy. Thanks for the elaboration, though!
Of course! Moon fuckery alone messes up orbits enough that you quickly realize this is impossible even without bringing the gravity of the fucking sun or Jupiter into it. It was just meant as an example of how gravity works and what escape velocity is. So this is what orbital mechanics says would happen if there were only two bodies of matter in the entire universe.
Your explanation is way better than my rambling answer I think. But just to nitpick a bit, 9.8 meters/second every second is the surface level acceleration, but since gravity weakens with distance and the edge of the gravity well is the furthest point from earth you could conceivably "drop" something and have it ever landing on earth, the initial acceleration would be incredibly slow. If we imagine a meteor that starts off static relative to earth and at the very limit of our gravity well it might be accelerated by a cm/year every year for the first few thousand years, and might take a million of years to actually hit. But when it hit it would do so at pretty much perfect escape velocity, and if it could pass through Earth it would just barely not escape our gravity well and would eventually fall back after another 2 million years.
Yeah, there's a lot of weird details here that can complicate things; I was going for a very basic answer. Even in the kind of case you're talking about, it's unlikely that the object would stay in a stable equilibrium--if it's really that close, perturbations from other objects' gravity would almost certainly kick it out of that cycle. The solar system is chaotic, and orbital dynamics get messy. Thanks for the elaboration, though!
Of course! Moon fuckery alone messes up orbits enough that you quickly realize this is impossible even without bringing the gravity of the fucking sun or Jupiter into it. It was just meant as an example of how gravity works and what escape velocity is. So this is what orbital mechanics says would happen if there were only two bodies of matter in the entire universe.