Q&A: General Astronomy and Space Science As the planet Earth is
accumulating meteoric dusts in tons every day, will not the mass
of the Earth increase? If so, does it affect its spin? Does the
gravity get affected? You are right, as dust from the cosmos
falls on the Earth, the Earth does gain mass. Even the tiniest
particle of dust will cause the Earth's mass to increase very
slightly. And spin does depend on the mass of the object that is
spinning. However, the mass of the Earth is so great compared
with the mass of dust falling onto it that this change is
negligible. It is hard to imagine how large the numbers are that
describe astronomical bodies, including our planet, but they are
so big that even several thousand tons of dust per day has
almost no effect on the object as a whole. For the record, the
mass of the Earth is approximately 5.97 times 1024 kilograms -
remember that one million is 1 times 106, so the mass of the
Earth is measured in millions of millions of millions of
millions