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In Newtonian mechanics, momentum (pl.: momenta or momentums; more specifically linear momentum or translational momentum) is the product of the mass and velocity of an object. It is a vector quantity, possessing a magnitude and a direction.
A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, except insofar as it is acted upon by a force. At any instant of time, the net force on a body is equal to the body's acceleration multiplied by its mass or, equivalently, the rate at which the body's momentum is changing with time.
The trivial case of the angular momentum of a body in an orbit is given by = where is the mass of the orbiting object, is the orbit's frequency and is the orbit's radius.. The angular momentum of a uniform rigid sphere rotating around its axis, instead, is given by = where is the sphere's mass, is the frequency of rotation and is the sphere's radius.
There are two main descriptions of motion: dynamics and kinematics.Dynamics is general, since the momenta, forces and energy of the particles are taken into account. In this instance, sometimes the term dynamics refers to the differential equations that the system satisfies (e.g., Newton's second law or Euler–Lagrange equations), and sometimes to the solutions to those equations.
Internal forces between the particles that make up a body do not contribute to changing the momentum of the body as there is an equal and opposite force resulting in no net effect. [3] The linear momentum of a rigid body is the product of the mass of the body and the velocity of its center of mass v cm. [1] [4] [5]
The scalar moment of inertia, , of a body about a specified axis whose direction is specified by the unit vector ^ and passes through the body at a point is as follows: [7] = ^ (= []) ^ = ^ ^ = ^ ^, where is the moment of inertia matrix of the system relative to the reference point , and [] is the skew symmetric matrix obtained from the vector =.
The moment of force, or torque, is a first moment: =, or, more generally, .; Similarly, angular momentum is the 1st moment of momentum: =.Momentum itself is not a moment.; The electric dipole moment is also a 1st moment: = for two opposite point charges or () for a distributed charge with charge density ().
The units and nature of each generalized momentum will depend on the corresponding coordinate; in this case p z is a translational momentum in the z direction, p s is also a translational momentum along the curve s is measured, and p φ is an angular momentum in the plane the angle φ is measured in. However complicated the motion of the system ...