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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 supernovae—in which gravity plays a dominant ro
Galileo was the first to demonstrate and then formulate these equations. He used a ramp to study rolling balls, the ramp slowing the acceleration enough to measure the time taken for the ball to roll a known distance. [1] [2] He measured elapsed time with a water clock, using an "extremely accurate balance" to measure the amount of water. [note 1]
The data is in good agreement with the predicted fall time of /, where h is the height and g is the free-fall acceleration due to gravity. Near the surface of the Earth, an object in free fall in a vacuum will accelerate at approximately 9.8 m/s 2 , independent of its mass .
These last three equations can be used as the starting point for the derivation of an equation of motion in General Relativity, instead of assuming that acceleration is zero in free fall. [2] Because the Minkowski tensor is involved here, it becomes necessary to introduce something called the metric tensor in General Relativity.
Maxwell's equations can be applied relative to an observer in free fall, because free-fall is an inertial frame. So the starting point of considerations is to work in the free-fall frame in a gravitational field—a "falling" observer. In the free-fall frame, Maxwell's equations have their usual, flat-spacetime form for the falling observer.
The free-fall formulation starts with all three bodies at rest. Because of this, the masses in a free-fall configuration do not orbit in a closed "loop", but travel forward and backward along an open "track". In 2023, Ivan Hristov, Radoslava Hristova, Dmitrašinović and Kiyotaka Tanikawa published a search for "periodic free-fall orbits" three ...
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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.