Chapter 14
Gravitation
![Gravitation](https://cloudfront.jove.com/files/media/science-education/science-education-thumbs/14716.jpg)
In the years before Newton, a general belief prevailed that different laws governed objects in the sky than objects on Earth. When Kepler wrote down…
![Newton's Law of Gravitation](https://cloudfront.jove.com/files/media/science-education/science-education-thumbs/12744.jpg)
Our everyday observation tells us that all objects close to the Earth naturally tend to fall to the ground. Early philosophers assumed that this…
![Gravity between Spherical Bodies](https://cloudfront.jove.com/files/media/science-education/science-education-thumbs/12745.jpg)
Newton's law of gravitation describes the gravitational force between any two point masses. However, for extended spherical objects like the…
![Reduced Mass Coordinates: Isolated Two-body Problem](https://cloudfront.jove.com/files/media/science-education/science-education-thumbs/14740.jpg)
In classical mechanics, the two-body problem is one of the fundamental problems describing the motion of two interacting bodies under gravity or any…
![Acceleration due to Gravity on Other Planets](https://cloudfront.jove.com/files/media/science-education/science-education-thumbs/12747.jpg)
The gravitational acceleration of an object near the Earth's surface is called the acceleration due to gravity. It can be measured by conducting…
![Apparent Weight and the Earth's Rotation](https://cloudfront.jove.com/files/media/science-education/science-education-thumbs/12748.jpg)
Since all objects on the Earth's surface move through a circle every 24 hours, there must be a net centripetal force on each object, directed…
![Potential Energy due to Gravitation](https://cloudfront.jove.com/files/media/science-education/science-education-thumbs/12750.jpg)
Since gravitational force is a conservative force, the amount of work done to move an object between two points in the gravitational field in which…
![The Principle of Superposition and the Gravitational Field](https://cloudfront.jove.com/files/media/science-education/science-education-thumbs/14754.jpg)
The principle of superposition applies to gravitational forces of objects that are sufficiently far apart. It states that the net gravitational force…
![Circular Orbits and Critical Velocity for Satellites](https://cloudfront.jove.com/files/media/science-education/science-education-thumbs/12752.jpg)
The Moon orbits around the Earth. In turn, the Earth (and other planets) orbit the Sun. The space directly above our atmosphere is filled with…
![Energy of a Satellite in a Circular Orbit](https://cloudfront.jove.com/files/media/science-education/science-education-thumbs/12753.jpg)
Thousands of artificial satellites orbit the Earth every day at various distances from the Earth. Satellites that orbit the Earth below an altitude…
![Kepler's Second Law of Planetary Motion](https://cloudfront.jove.com/files/media/science-education/science-education-thumbs/12755.jpg)
In the early 17th century, German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler postulated three laws for the motion of planets in the solar system.…
![Kepler's Third Law of Planetary Motion](https://cloudfront.jove.com/files/media/science-education/science-education-thumbs/12756.jpg)
In the early 17th century, German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler postulated three laws for the motion of planets in the solar system.…
![Schwarzschild Radius and Event Horizon](https://cloudfront.jove.com/files/media/science-education/science-education-thumbs/12758.jpg)
No object with a finite mass can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. This fact has an interesting consequence in the domain of…
![Detection of Black Holes](https://cloudfront.jove.com/files/media/science-education/science-education-thumbs/12759.jpg)
Although black holes were theoretically postulated in the 1920s, they remained outside the domain of observational astronomy until the 1970s.
Their…