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Vesta (radius 262.7 ± 0.1 km), the second-largest asteroid, appears to have a differentiated interior and therefore likely was once a dwarf planet, but it is no longer very round today. [74] Pallas (radius 255.5 ± 2 km ), the third-largest asteroid, appears never to have completed differentiation and likewise has an irregular shape.
The second major reason for the difference in gravity at different latitudes is that the Earth's equatorial bulge (itself also caused by centrifugal force from rotation) causes objects at the Equator to be further from the planet's center than objects at the poles. The force due to gravitational attraction between two masses (a piece of the ...
That is, the individual gravitational forces exerted on a point at radius r 0 by the elements of the mass outside the radius r 0 cancel each other. As a consequence, for example, within a shell of uniform thickness and density there is no net gravitational acceleration anywhere within the hollow sphere.
The second law establishes that when a planet is closer to the Sun, it travels faster. The third law expresses that the farther a planet is from the Sun, the longer its orbital period. Isaac Newton showed in 1687 that relationships like Kepler's would apply in the Solar System as a consequence of his own laws of motion and law of universal ...
The gravitational field equation is [7] = = = | | =, where F is the gravitational force, m is the mass of the test particle, R is the radial vector of the test particle relative to the mass (or for Newton's second law of motion which is a time dependent function, a set of positions of test particles each occupying a particular point in space ...
The Earth, among other planets, orbits the Sun because the Sun exerts a gravitational pull that acts as a centripetal force, holding the Earth to it, which would otherwise go shooting off into space. If the Sun's pull is considered an action, then Earth simultaneously exerts a reaction as a gravitational pull on the Sun. Earth's pull has the ...
Animations of the Solar System's inner planets orbiting. Each frame represents 2 days of motion. Animations of the Solar System's outer planets orbiting. This animation is 100 times faster than the inner planet animation. The planets and other large objects in orbit around the Sun lie near the plane of Earth's orbit, known as the ecliptic ...
Solutions are also used to describe the motion of binary stars around each other, and estimate their gradual loss of energy through gravitational radiation. General relativity describes the gravitational field by curved space-time; the field equations governing this curvature are nonlinear and therefore difficult to solve in a closed form.