Earthed - What keeps the planets and sun in place?

What keeps the planets and sun in place?

What keeps the planets and sun in place? In other words, why are they not floating around and bumping into each other?

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the sun itself is wabbling along through space, but the planets themselves are bound to the sun through gravitational pull
Gravity?

cause the energy of the sun.
gravity
Each planet is moving in a relatively stable orbit around the sun - the sun's gravity keeps pulling the planets towards it, and their motion keeps pulling them outward.

Think of a string with a rock attached - if you twirl it around your head at the right speed the rock will stay moving horizontally to the ground - the string is the sun's gravity and the twirling around is the planet's motion in orbit.
I've just read that the gravity on the sun is 28 times greater than the Earth.

It is gravity that keeps satellites and space stations in an orbit around the Earth, at least if that orbit does not intersect the Earth, because then they would crash, and if that orbit isn't too low above the Earth, because then they'd be slowed down by friction with the outermost layers of the atmosphere of the Earth, and then they'd fall down after all. Gravity also keeps the Moon in its orbit around the Earth, and the Earth and the other planets and comets and asteroids in an orbit around the Sun, and the Sun in an orbit around the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy.
They ARE floating around, and they DO sometimes bump. Each of those thousands of craters on the Moon was caused by a different asteroid crashing into the Moon. The Moon itself was formed when a Mars size object hit Earth billions of years ago and smashed a big piece off, which became the Moon.

But gravity and centrifugal force work to keep them in pretty well defined paths, and space if BIG, so it is very rare for these collisions to happen in times as short as a human life time or even all recorded history.
The planets are in stable orbits around the sun. The sun's gravity is relatively constans, so the orbits are stable. The sun itself is moving (in orbit) within the Milky Way galaxy, so it is by no means "in place". The galaxy is also moving and is actually on a collision path with the Andromeda galaxy. They are expected to colide and either path through each other or merge sometime in a few billion years.
Actually, the sun is not known to be in a fixed position. The planets, however, stay in there orbit because of two things: Gravity, and centrifugal force.

The sun has a strong gravitational pull on the planets, but the centrifugal force of the planets is keeping them away from the sun.

Think of it as filling a bucket of water about half way, and swinging in around in a windmill (like a softball pitcher.) Even when the bucket is turned completely toward the ground, if you're spinning it fast enough, gravity can't make the water come out because of its centrifugal force. The faster it spins, the greater the centrifugal force.

Hope this helps you!
the force of gravity
The sun really isn't "in place." It is orbiting around the center of the galaxy. The planets are all in orbital paths around the sun. In space, orbiting objects are the main order of business.

Luis, you stole somebody else's best answer again, I see.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AjNasqq9HZNefOd5HIFTzn4jzKIX;_ylv=3?qid=1006041901670

That makes 6 times I've caught you plagiarizing in the last hour.