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The solar mass (M ☉), 1.988 92 × 10 30 kg, is a standard way to express mass in astronomy, used to describe the masses of other stars and galaxies. It is equal to the mass of the Sun, about 333 000 times the mass of the Earth or 1 048 times the mass of Jupiter.
The value of G times the mass of an object, called the standard gravitational parameter, is known for the Sun and several planets to a much higher accuracy than G alone. [13] As a result, the solar mass is used as the standard mass in the astronomical system of units .
The choice of solar mass, M ☉, as the basic unit for planetary mass comes directly from the calculations used to determine planetary mass.In the most precise case, that of the Earth itself, the mass is known in terms of solar masses to twelve significant figures: the same mass, in terms of kilograms or other Earth-based units, is only known to five significant figures, which is less than a ...
The cosmic distance ladder (also known as the extragalactic distance scale) is the succession of methods by which astronomers determine the distances to celestial objects. A direct distance measurement of an astronomical object is possible only for those objects that are "close enough" (within about a thousand parsecs) to Earth. The techniques ...
An object with small inertial mass will accelerate more than an object with large inertial mass when acted upon by the same force. One says the body of greater mass has greater inertia . Active gravitational mass [ note 4 ] is a measure of the strength of an object's gravitational flux (gravitational flux is equal to the surface integral of ...
[7] [15] [16] Equivalently, by this definition, one au is "the radius of an unperturbed circular Newtonian orbit about the sun of a particle having infinitesimal mass, moving with an angular frequency of 0.017 202 098 95 radians per day "; [17] or alternatively that length for which the heliocentric gravitational constant (the product GM ...
The James Webb Space Telescope recently allowed astronomers to identify the first brown dwarfs in a globular cluster, which have a similar mass to the object. But there are too few examples thus ...
The mass includes a retroreflector and terminates one arm of a Michelson interferometer. By counting and timing the interference fringes, the acceleration of the mass can be measured. [4] A more recent development is a "rise and fall" version that tosses the mass upward and measures both upward and downward motion. [5]