The Law of Universal Gravitation states that every object in the universe attracts every other object in the universe with a force that has a magnitude which is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the distance between their centers squared.
where
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G is the gravitational constant, 6.67 x 10-11 Nm2/kg2
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M1 is the mass of the first body in kg
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M2 is the mass of the second body in kg
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R is the distance from the center of M1 to the center of M2
This is the first of several important inverse-square relationships that we will study: light intensity and electrostatic force are two others.
Let's practice this relationship by looking at a few examples.
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