Crash Course Astronomy Episode 7: Gravity

I was traveling last week and couldn’t put up a post about Crash Course Astronomy when it came out. So, belatedly, here is Episode 7: Gravity!

Writing these episodes can be a tightrope walk. Gravity is an interesting topic; since we’re still early in the series, I wanted to go over the aspects of gravity we’ll need to talk about planets and moons, asteroids and comets. That means discussing it as a force, how it makes things move, how orbits work, and the difference between mass and weight. That also means not getting into things like how gravity curves space, and why massless photons are still affected by gravity. I mention it but don’t go into details. Think of it as a teaser for a later episode.

I wrestled over discussing how gravity is a force that accelerates things. This is part of Newton’s Second Law of Motion: A force acting on a mass will accelerate it.^* The gravity of the Earth is independent of the mass it’s working on; it’s a property of the Earth itself. If you drop two objects of different weights, they’ll fall at the same rate (ignoring air resistance). My friend Brian Cox demonstrated that quite ably.

The objects will accelerate, which means that the longer they fall, the faster they’ll go. That acceleration is a property of Earth’s gravity, and will be the same for any object. Drop a ball near the ground, and it will accelerate at a rate of about 9.8 meters per second for every second it falls. After one second it’s moving at 9.8 m/s. After two seconds it falls at 19.6 m/s, and so on.

But the force it feels is different than a ball that has a different mass. That’s the weird part that can be confusing. Gravity accelerates everything the same, but if you have more mass you feel more force. When it comes to gravity, we call that force weight. Because the force is bigger we think a more massive ball will fall faster, but it doesn’t because the acceleration is the same as it is for a less massive ball.

But if you want to stop a heavier ball, you’ll have to apply more force than you would on a lighter ball. When the heavier ball hits the ground, it hits harder than the lighter one, even though they’ll impact at the same speed.

Now, did you notice the verbal switcheroo I just pulled? I talked about the more and less massive balls in one paragraph, then called them heavier and lighter in the next. That’s sloppy (though I did it on purpose to prove a point)! In deep space, with no (or negligible) forces acting on them, they both weigh the same: nothing. But their masses are different. Wheee!

If you think you get this now, yay! Good. But here’s a test: What weighs more: a 5 pound helium balloon, or a 5 pound block of cheese? The answer may seem obvious, but explaining it isn’t all that easy.

Maybe I’ll need to make a bonus video with that. I’ll need a big balloon. I wonder if I can get George Clooney and Sandra Bullock to guest star?

^*Actually an unbalanced force; if you have another equal but oppositely directed force acting on it, the object won’t accelerate. If it’s moving it’ll still move, but if it’s just sitting there it won’t start to move. See why you need to simplify sometimes? You just need to be careful that you don’t oversimplify and make things worse. That’s another reason writing these episodes can be tricky.