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Free fall. In classical mechanics, free fall is any motion of a body where gravity is the only force acting upon it. A freely falling object may not necessarily be falling down in the vertical direction. An object moving upwards might not normally be considered to be falling, but if it is subject to only the force of gravity, it is said to be ...
Free-fall time. The free-fall time is the characteristic time that would take a body to collapse under its own gravitational attraction, if no other forces existed to oppose the collapse. As such, it plays a fundamental role in setting the timescale for a wide variety of astrophysical processes—from star formation to helioseismology to ...
Equations for a falling body. A set of equations describing the trajectories of objects subject to a constant gravitational force under normal Earth -bound conditions. Assuming constant acceleration g due to Earth’s gravity, Newton's law of universal gravitation simplifies to F = mg, where F is the force exerted on a mass m by the Earth’s ...
Three-body problem. Approximate trajectories of three identical bodies located at the vertices of a scalene triangle and having zero initial velocities. The center of mass, in accordance with the law of conservation of momentum, remains in place. In physics, specifically classical mechanics, the three-body problem is to take the initial ...
In physics, gravitational acceleration is the acceleration of an object in free fall within a vacuum (and thus without experiencing drag). This is the steady gain in speed caused exclusively by gravitational attraction. All bodies accelerate in vacuum at the same rate, regardless of the masses or compositions of the bodies; [1] the measurement ...
Terminal velocity. The downward force of gravity (Fg) equals the restraining force of drag (Fd) plus the buoyancy. The net force on the object is zero, and the result is that the velocity of the object remains constant. Terminal velocity is the maximum speed attainable by an object as it falls through a fluid (air is the most common example).
The equivalence principle is the hypothesis that the observed equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass is a consequence of nature. The weak form, known for centuries, relates to masses of any composition in free fall taking the same trajectories and landing at identical times. The extended form by Albert Einstein requires special ...
In 1551, Domingo de Soto suggested that objects in free fall accelerate uniformly. [8] Two years later, mathematician Giambattista Benedetti questioned why two balls, one made of iron and one of wood, would fall at the same speed. [8] All of this preceded the 1564 birth of Galileo Galilei.