A 60 kg person travels to the moon. What happens to the persons weight?

апреля 09, 2022 Отправить комментарий

YOUR WEIGHT ON OTHER WORLDS

Ever wonder what you might weigh on Mars or The Moon? Here'south your risk to notice out.

TO DO & Observe:

Fill in your weight below in the space indicated. You lot tin enter your weight in any unit you wish.
Click on the "Summate" push button.
Notice that the weights on other worlds will automatically fill up in. Discover that your weight is different on the different worlds.
Y'all can click on the images of the planets to become more information almost them from Nib Arnett's incredible Nine Planets spider web site.

WHAT'S GOING ON?

Mass and Weight

Before nosotros get into the subject of gravity and how it acts, it'south important to understand the difference betwixt weight and mass.

Nosotros oft utilize the terms "mass" and "weight" interchangeably in our daily speech, but to an astronomer or a physicist they are completely different things. The mass of a trunk is a measure of how much matter it contains. An object with mass has a quality called inertia. If you lot milk shake an object like a stone in your hand, you would detect that it takes a push button to become it moving, and some other push button to terminate it over again. If the stone is at balance, it wants to remain at rest. Once yous've got it moving, it wants to stay moving. This quality or "languor" of matter is its inertia. Mass is a measure out of how much inertia an object displays.

Weight is an entirely different affair. Every object in the universe with mass attracts every other object with mass. The amount of attraction depends on the size of the masses and how far apart they are. For everyday-sized objects, this gravitational pull is vanishingly pocket-size, just the pull betwixt a very large object, like the Earth, and some other object, similar you, can be easily measured. How? All y'all take to do is stand up on a scale! Scales measure the force of attraction between you and the Earth. This force of allure betwixt yous and the World (or whatever other planet) is chosen your weight.

If you are in a spaceship far between the stars and you put a scale underneath you, the scale would read zilch. Your weight is zero. You are weightless. In that location is an anvil floating next to you lot. It's as well weightless. Are you or the anvil mass-less? Absolutely non. If you grabbed the anvil and tried to shake information technology, you would have to button it to go it going and pull information technology to get it to finish. It all the same has inertia, and hence mass, nonetheless it has no weight. See the divergence?

The Human relationship Between Gravity and Mass and Distance

As stated above, your weight is a measure of the pull of gravity betwixt you and the body you lot are continuing on. This force of gravity depends on a few things. First, it depends on your mass and the mass of the planet y'all are standing on. If you double your mass, gravity pulls on yous twice as hard. If the planet you are standing on is twice equally massive, gravity also pulls on you twice as hard. On the other mitt, the farther you are from the heart of the planet, the weaker the pull between the planet and your body. The strength gets weaker quite quickly. If you double your distance from the planet, the force is one-fourth. If you triple your separation, the forcefulness drops to one-9th. Ten times the altitude, one-hundredth the strength. See the design? The force drops off with the square of the distance. If we put this into an equation it would wait like this:

math equation

Equations are guides to thinking

The ii "M'southward" on acme are your mass and the planet'southward mass. The "r" beneath is the distance from the centre of the planet. The masses are in the numerator because the forcefulness gets bigger if they get bigger. The distance is in the denominator because the force gets smaller when the distance gets bigger. Note that the force never becomes goose egg no matter how far you travel. Perhaps this was the inspiration for the poem by Francis Thompson:

All things
by immortal power
about or far
to each other
hiddenly linked are.
That k cans't not stir a flower
without troubling a star.

Isaac Newton

This equation, first derived by Sir Isaac Newton, tells the states a lot. For instance, yous may suspect that because Jupiter is 318 times as massive as the Earth, you should weigh 318 times what you weigh at home. This would be true if Jupiter was the same size equally the Earth. Only, Jupiter is 11 times the radius of the Globe, so you are 11 times farther from the center. This reduces the pull by a factor of xi² resulting in about two.53 times the pull of Earth on y'all. Continuing on a neutron star makes you lot unimaginably weighty. Not only is the star very massive to start with (well-nigh the aforementioned as the Sun), just information technology is also incredibly small (about the size of San Francisco), so y'all are very close to the centre and r is a very pocket-sized number. Small numbers in the denominator of a fraction lead to very large results!

Weaver Whismainfits74