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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 gravitational field of strength g.
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 ...
The gravitational force is a fictitious force. There is no gravitational acceleration, in that the proper acceleration and hence four-acceleration of objects in free fall are zero. Rather than undergoing an acceleration, objects in free fall travel along straight lines ( geodesics ) on the curved spacetime.
This is because the gravitational force is an extremely weak force as compared to other fundamental forces at the laboratory scale. [d] In SI units, the CODATA-recommended value of the gravitational constant is: [1] = 6.674 30 (15) × 10 −11 m 3 ⋅kg −1 ⋅s −2. The relative standard uncertainty is 2.2 × 10 −5.
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.
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
As a rule of thumb, for a constant acceleration at 1 g (Earth gravity), the journey time, as measured on Earth, will be the distance in light years to the destination, plus 1 year. This rule of thumb will give answers that are slightly shorter than the exact calculated answer, but reasonably accurate.
Most modern approaches to mathematical general relativity begin with the concept of a manifold.More precisely, the basic physical construct representing gravitation — a curved spacetime — is modelled by a four-dimensional, smooth, connected, Lorentzian manifold.