To Figure Out What You Weight on the Surface of the Moon You Need to Know

YOUR WEIGHT ON OTHER WORLDS

Ever wonder what y'all might counterbalance on Mars or The Moon? Here'south your gamble to find out.

TO Do & Observe:

• Fill in your weight below in the space indicated. Yous can enter your weight in any unit of measurement you wish.
• Click on the "Calculate" button.
• Notice that the weights on other worlds will automatically fill in. Find that your weight is different on the different worlds.
• Y'all tin click on the images of the planets to get more than information most them from Bill Arnett's incredible Nine Planets web site.

WHAT'S GOING ON?

Mass and Weight

Before nosotros get into the subject of gravity and how information technology acts, it'due south important to sympathize the departure between weight and mass.

Nosotros oftentimes use the terms "mass" and "weight" interchangeably in our daily oral communication, but to an astronomer or a physicist they are completely different things. The mass of a body is a measure of how much affair it contains. An object with mass has a quality called inertia. If you milk shake an object similar a stone in your hand, yous would notice that information technology takes a push button to get it moving, and another push to cease it again. If the stone is at remainder, it wants to remain at rest. One time you've got information technology moving, it wants to stay moving. This quality or "sluggishness" of thing is its inertia. Mass is a mensurate of how much inertia an object displays.

Weight is an entirely different thing. Every object in the universe with mass attracts every other object with mass. The amount of allure depends on the size of the masses and how far apart they are. For everyday-sized objects, this gravitational pull is vanishingly small, but the pull betwixt a very big object, like the Earth, and some other object, like you, can be hands measured. How? All you have to do is stand on a scale! Scales measure the force of attraction betwixt yous and the Earth. This strength of allure betwixt you and the World (or any other planet) is called your weight.

If you are in a spaceship far between the stars and you put a calibration underneath you, the scale would read cipher. Your weight is zero. Yous are weightless. In that location is an anvil floating next to y'all. Information technology's also weightless. Are you or the anvil mass-less? Admittedly not. If you lot grabbed the anvil and tried to shake it, you would take to button information technology to get information technology going and pull it to get it to stop. It nevertheless has inertia, and hence mass, yet it has no weight. See the difference?

The Relationship Between Gravity and Mass and Distance

As stated above, your weight is a mensurate of the pull of gravity between you and the torso you are standing on. This force of gravity depends on a few things. First, it depends on your mass and the mass of the planet you are standing on. If yous double your mass, gravity pulls on you lot twice every bit difficult. If the planet y'all are standing on is twice as massive, gravity besides pulls on y'all twice as hard. On the other hand, the farther you are from the center of the planet, the weaker the pull between the planet and your torso. The strength gets weaker quite rapidly. If you double your distance from the planet, the force is i-fourth. If you triple your separation, the force drops to one-ninth. 10 times the distance, one-hundredth the force. Run across the pattern? The force drops off with the square of the distance. If nosotros put this into an equation it would look like this:

The 2 "M's" on pinnacle are your mass and the planet'due south mass. The "r" below is the distance from the center of the planet. The masses are in the numerator because the strength gets bigger if they become bigger. The altitude is in the denominator because the force gets smaller when the distance gets bigger. Note that the force never becomes zero no matter how far you travel. Perchance this was the inspiration for the poem by Francis Thompson:

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

Isaac Newton

This equation, showtime derived by Sir Isaac Newton, tells usa a lot. For example, you lot may suspect that because Jupiter is 318 times as massive as the Globe, you should weigh 318 times what yous weigh at abode. This would be true if Jupiter was the same size as the Earth. But, Jupiter is eleven times the radius of the Earth, so you are 11 times further from the center. This reduces the pull by a factor of 11ⁱⁱ resulting in most ii.53 times the pull of World on you lot. Standing on a neutron star makes y'all unimaginably weighty. Not merely is the star very massive to kickoff with (about the same as the Sun), merely information technology is also incredibly pocket-sized (about the size of San Francisco), so y'all are very close to the center and r is a very small number. Small-scale numbers in the denominator of a fraction lead to very big results!

LINKS

• Your Historic period On Other Worlds
• Build A Solar System
• The Exploratorium's "Observatory"
• The Ix Planets
• Views of the Solar System
• NSSDC Solar Arrangement folio
• NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
• Astronomy Motion picture of the Day

To Figure Out What You Weight on the Surface of the Moon You Need to Know

Source: https://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/weight/

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