# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged gravity

76

TL:DR Jupiter isn't dense enough for its gravity gradient over Earth's radius to produce a 1g tidal acceleration, even right at Jupiter's surface. thanks to PeterCordes Jupiter's gravity will pull on the Earth itself, as well as everything on it. It's not like a vacuum cleaner that selectively lifts small and light objects, the gravitational force will ...

72

Essentially gas does, it just happens to form a star first. Mass is not the only factor in creating a black hole. You also need for this mass to reach a high density. In the process of doing this, a star usually forms. The energy producing processes in the star interior produce a pressure that balances the gravitation attraction. This prevents a star from ...

58

You do, but it's too small to really notice First, it's not correct to say that we don't feel Earth's rotation because it's rotating at a constant speed. Think about driving a car, or riding in an airplane. Whether you're cruising down the road at 90 kph, or soaring through the air at 900 kph, you don't really "feel the speed". However, When you take a ...

54

As you said, the mass of the Moon is 1.2 percent that of the Earth. Now, if you mean the gravitational acceleration at the surface, it is calculated like this $G\frac{M}{R^2}$, where $M$ is the mass, and $R$ is the radius of the celestial body. The moon's mass is a hundred times smaller, but the radius is four times smaller, meaning its surface gravity will ...

52

1. Is material on Earth's surface not in free fall around Earth's center? No. Material on the Earth's surface -- or inside it -- is not in orbit, and so is not in free fall. You can temporarily put yourself into an orbit (and thus into free fall) by jumping up into the air, or jumping off a higher surface. When you do this, you are briefly in a very ...

45

No need to guess. There's solid research done in this field. Even Wikipedia has some info: As two black holes approach each other, a ‘duckbill’ shape protrudes from each of the two event horizons towards the other one. This protrusion extends longer and narrower until it meets the protrusion from the other black hole. At this point in time the event ...

43

It's more for safety than anything else. Space is a very dangerous place for so many reasons. And making mistakes can very easily cause death. Being weightless does not mean you lose mass, so momentum is just as difficult as ever. But whereas on the ground you can easily use friction to stop, in space if you try to stop against the floor you will just move ...

42

It is not true that "objects float around" in the solar system. Perhaps you have seen video from the space station, and you can see things floating. This is not because there is no gravity, but because everything in the space station going at the same speed in the same direction. This makes it look as if things are floating. In fact the space station and ...

40

You really need a full-blown stellar evolution model to answer this precisely and I'm not sure anyone would ever have done this with an oxygen-dominated star. To zeroth order the answer will be the similar to a metal-rich star - i.e. about 0.075 times the mass of the Sun. Any less than this and the brown dwarf (for that is what we call a star that never ...

37

It depends on what object it's acting on. There are many objects, including stars, that have magnetic fields where Lorentz forces on charged particles like electrons and protons are stronger than the gravitational force on them. Also remember that the strength of the Lorentz force depends on the speed of the particle moving through it, so a fast enough ...

34

The answer to this is surprising: We are. And many (if not all) other galaxies. And they move faster than light. See, the universe is expanding, at an accelerating rate. The fabric of spacetime itself stretches out, so that galaxies seem to move away from each other. The interesting thing is that relativity does not forbid these from moving away faster ...

34

The actual image isn't much. I was able to find it from Science, and this is all it is: It's just a ripple, seen at slightly different times from two different observatories. The shift fits perfectly by shifting it by the speed of light difference in their locations. Thus is the proof of gravity waves. It should be noted that the reason there are two ...

33

To help with James K's excellent answer, a visual representation might help. Let's look at a thought experiment - Newton's Cannonball. Let's say you have a cannon, high enough that it's being held above Earth's atmosphere. You fire it, and it falls to Earth a little ways away ("D" in the below diagram). You fire another one with more power so it's moving ...

31

The first question as stated has a rather trivial answer: "If the sun magically disappeared, instantly, along with all its influences, how long would it take its gravity to stop having an effect on us?" Since the Sun's gravity is among its influences, it would instantly stop having an effect on us. That's just part of the magical situation, and doesn't ...

29

First of all: "How gravity really works" is a deep question, and any serious scientist would quickly concede that all we have is an incomplete working model. You certainly have heard about General Relativity; the first image on the page is your trampoline. Our working model, General Relativity, is working because it explains a lot of observations very ...

29

Potentially a short (less than a second) burst of gravitational waves (GWs) would be detected. Much depends on asymmetries in the core collapse, since a spherically (or even axially) symmetric collapse would not produce GWs (e.g. Morozova et al. 2019). However, theoretical models suggest that the GWs start at low frequency (tens of Hz) and are associated ...

28

As HDE 226868 noted in his answer, the Sun is not going to go supernova. That's something only large stars experience at the end of their main sequence life. Our Sun is a dwarf star. It's not big enough to do that. It will instead expand to be a red giant when it burns out the hydrogen at the very core of the Sun. It will continue burning hydrogen as a red ...

27

"Perfectly" is a funny word. Perfect circles are a mathematical abstraction. Real objects are not "perfect". So supposing a "perfectly spherical planet" is to suppose something that does not and could not exist. All real planets are made of atoms and anything made of little clumps of matter cannot be perfectly spherical. Even if you built a planet that ...

26

First of all, I think your question belies a misunderstanding of the nature of the LIGO observatories. The nature of the detectors is that they act like a microphone, as opposed to a camera. What that means is that they are sensitive to gravitational waves coming in from most directions, but don't have an ability to distinguish where the waves came from. ...

24

The answer to the headline question is: No. Most of Saturn's rings are below the Roche limit of about 2.5 Saturn radii. Hence tidal forces will prevent that part of the rings to form a (large) moon. Actually, part of the rings may be caused by loss of material from some of Saturn's moons, as suspected from observations of Enceladus. Accretion of Earth is ...

24

The local dark matter density is actually quite tiny, on the order of $\rho\sim10^{-19}\text{ g/cm}^3$ (see e.g. Bovy & Tremaine (2012)). This means that there is roughly $0.001$-$0.01M_{\odot}$ of dark matter per cubic parsec - a staggeringly small amount. 1000 cubic parsecs would contain about one solar mass of dark matter - and that's a cube 10 ...

24

In simple terms: Because the gas nukes itself apart. When the gas (H or He) is put under extremely high pressure, which happens before a black hole is formed, the atoms start nuclear fusion, which releases a lot of energy. That continuous stream of energy is what makes the sun bright and is also what keeps the sun from collapsing into itself. When the ...

24

Firstly the speeds are massively different (about 1000 mph (1610 kph) on the equator for Earth's rotation and 70,000 mph (112,654 kph) for the revolution), so the change is not large. Secondly, the green line is far straighter than it appears in your picture (because the orbit is so large) so Earth's motion around the Sun is pretty close to motion at ...

23

Each time Halley's comet passes us, we can make a pretty good estimate of its current orbit, and determine how close it will get to the massive bodies of the solar system like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune on its next orbit. We can make good estimates of gravitational perturbation effects, and thereby know where to look for it. In fact, astronomers ...

23

Roche limit happens where the gravity of the object, trying to pull the object together, becomes smaller than the tidal force (trying to pull the object apart). But the astronaut is bound by not gravity, rather by the electromagnetic interaction between his/her atoms. The own gravity of the astronaut is negligible, compared to the electromagnetic ...

22

The problem with trying to form a black hole with dark matter is that dark matter can only weakly interact (if at all) with normal matter and itself, other than by gravity. This poses a problem. To get dark matter concentrated enough to form a black hole requires it to increase its (negative) gravitational binding energy without at the same time increasing ...

22

Multiple theories and hypotheses have been proposed as an alternative to dark matter (DM). The most popular are, arguably, MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics):A term for various theories where the gravitational force falls off less steeply than $1/r^2$ at large distances. TeVeS (Tensor–vector–scalar):A relativistic generalization of MOND. f(R) gravity:A ...

21

Yes, the moon is moving away from Earth at around 1.48" per year. According to the BBC: The Moon is kept in orbit by the gravitational force that the Earth exerts on it, but the Moon also exerts a gravitational force on our planet and this causes the movement of the Earth's oceans to form a tidal bulge. Due to the rotation of the Earth, this tidal ...

21

It is quite correct that a black hole has so much mass that light cannot escape from a region around the black hole. The edge of this region is called the event horizon. If you cross an event horizon you are never coming back. That applies equally to light, and matter. Around the black hole there may be matter in orbit. Since the Black hole has such strong ...

21

Yes, it's possible in theory, but beyond current technology to achieve. The focal point of the Earth is 15300 AU away. By contrast, Neptune is about 30AU. As a gravitational lens is not like a glass lens, you don't get an image formed and at any distance greater than 15300 AU an Einstein ring would be formed around the Earth. But at that distance, the Earth ...

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