Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
For two pairwise interacting point particles, the gravitational potential energy is the work that an outside agent must do in order to quasi-statically bring the masses together (which is therefore, exactly opposite the work done by the gravitational field on the masses): = = where is the displacement vector of the mass, is gravitational force acting on it and denotes scalar product.
In the spherical-coordinates example above, there are no cross-terms; the only nonzero metric tensor components are g rr = 1, g θθ = r 2 and g φφ = r 2 sin 2 θ. In his special theory of relativity, Albert Einstein showed that the distance ds between two spatial points is not constant, but depends on the motion of the observer.
Here F N is the Newtonian force, m is the object's (gravitational) mass, a is its acceleration, μ (x) is an as-yet unspecified function (called the interpolating function), and a 0 is a new fundamental constant which marks the transition between the Newtonian and deep-MOND regimes. Agreement with Newtonian mechanics requires
the vector r is the position of one body relative to the other; r, v, and in the case of an elliptic orbit, the semi-major axis a, are defined accordingly (hence r is the distance) μ = Gm 1 + Gm 2 = μ 1 + μ 2, where m 1 and m 2 are the masses of the two bodies. Then: for circular orbits, rv 2 = r 3 ω 2 = 4π 2 r 3 /T 2 = μ
where F is the gravitational force acting between two objects, m 1 and m 2 are the masses of the objects, r is the distance between the centers of their masses, and G is the gravitational constant. The first test of Newton's law of gravitation between masses in the laboratory was the Cavendish experiment conducted by the British scientist Henry ...
There are many useful features of the effective potential, such as . To find the radius of a circular orbit, simply minimize the effective potential with respect to , or equivalently set the net force to zero and then solve for : = After solving for , plug this back into to find the maximum value of the effective potential .
A common misconception occurs between centre of mass and centre of gravity.They are defined in similar ways but are not exactly the same quantity. Centre of mass is the mathematical description of placing all the mass in the region considered to one position, centre of gravity is a real physical quantity, the point of a body where the gravitational force acts.
A light source passes behind a gravitational lens (invisible point mass placed in the center of the image). The aqua circle is the light source as it would be seen if there were no lens, while white spots are the multiple images of the source (see Einstein ring).