gravitation

…accelerate equally implies that the gravitational force causing acceleration bears a constant relation to the inertial mass. According to Newton’s postulated law of gravitation, two bodies of mass m₁ and m₂, separated by a distance r, exert equal attractive forces on each other (the equal action and reaction of the…

…takes the same form in gravitational theory, the flux of gravitational field lines through a closed surface being determined by the total mass within. This enables a proof to be given immediately of a problem that caused Newton considerable trouble. He was able to show, by direct summation over all…

This field of inquiry has in the past been placed within classical mechanics for historical reasons, because both fields were brought to a high state of perfection by Newton and also because of its universal character. Newton’s gravitational law states that every material particle…

As long as gravitational effects can be ignored, which is true so long as gravitational potential energy differences are small compared with mc², the effects of Einstein’s general theory of relativity may be safely ignored.

…was the same as the gravitational force attracting objects to Earth. Newton further concluded that the force of attraction between two massive bodies was proportional to the inverse square of their separation and to the product of their masses, known as the law of universal gravitation. Kepler’s laws are derivable…

…high orbital eccentricity leads to gravitational torques that make synchronous rotation unstable. As a result, the tides have brought Hyperion to a state where it tumbles chaotically with large changes in the direction and magnitude of its spin on time scales comparable to its orbital period of about 21 days.

The physical foundation of Einstein’s view of gravitation, general relativity, lies on two empirical findings that he elevated to the status of basic postulates. The first postulate is the relativity principle: local physics is governed by the theory of…

The law of universal gravitation generalized the work of Galileo and the English physicist Robert Hooke on terrestrial gravity, asserting that two massive bodies attract one another with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their separation distance. By…

The energy of the quanta of electromagnetic radiation is subject to gravitational forces just like a mass of magnitude m = hν/c². This is so because the relationship of energy E and mass m is E = mc². As a consequence, light…

…in a straight line, while gravitational force tends to pull it down. The orbital path, elliptical or circular, thus represents a balance between gravity and inertia. A cannon fired from a mountaintop will throw a projectile farther if its muzzle velocity is increased. If velocity is made high enough the…

Within this distance the gravitational attraction of two small bodies for each other is smaller than the difference in the attraction of the planet for each of them. Hence, the two cannot accrete to form a larger object. Moreover, because a planet’s gravitational field acts to disperse the distribution…

…due to the emission of gravitational radiation. The existence of gravitational radiation was predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity but not seen directly until 2015.

…where it is largest, the gravitational acceleration g is about 0.5 percent smaller than at the poles, where there is no centrifugal force. This same centrifugal force is responsible for the fact that Earth is slightly nonspherical, bulging just a bit at the Equator.

…still another basic physical force, gravitation, which though much weaker than the electric force, is always attractive and is the dominant force at great distances. At distances between these extremes, including the distances of everyday life, the only significant physical force is the electric force in its many varieties along…

…of physics that states that gravitational and inertial forces are of a similar nature and often indistinguishable. In the Newtonian form it asserts, in effect, that, within a windowless laboratory freely falling in a uniform gravitational field, experimenters would be unaware that the laboratory is in a state of nonuniform…

…has a property called the gravitational field at that point, numerically equal to the acceleration of gravity at that point. Alternatively, weight is the product of an object’s mass and either the gravitational field or the acceleration of gravity at the point where the object is located.

…move in a slightly different gravitational field. Earth is in free fall, but the pull of the Moon is not the same at Earth’s surface as at its centre; the rise and fall of ocean tides occur because the oceans are not in perfect free fall.