Links Brain Pop Videos: Solar System Gravity
Because of gravity, if you drop something, it falls down, instead of up. Well, everybody knows that! But, what does this really mean? What is gravity?
Gravity
has played a big part in making the universe the way it is. Gravity is
what makes pieces of matter clump together into planets, moons, and
stars. Gravity is what makes the planets orbit the stars--like Earth
orbits our star, the Sun. Gravity is what makes the stars clump
together in huge, swirling galaxies.
A
great scientist, Albert Einstein, who lived in the 20th century, had a
new idea about gravity. He thought that gravity is what happens when
space itself is curved or warped around a mass, such as a star or a
planet. Thus, a star or planet would cause kind of a dip in space so
that any other object that came too near would tend to fall into the
dip. This 2-D animation gives an idea of how gravity works in 3-D.
Fun facts
- The gravity on the moon is about 16 percent of that on Earth, Mars has about 38 percent of Earth's pull, while the biggest planet in the solar system, Jupiter, has 2.5 times the gravity of Earth.
- Though nobody "discovered" gravity, legend has it that famous astronomer Galileo Galilei did some of the earliest experiments with gravity, dropping balls off the Tower of Pisa to see how fast they fell.
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