![]() To completely escape the pull of the Earth permanently, however, does take a little bit of work: you have to reach escape velocity, which is a speed of 25,000 miles per hour. The Earth weighs a whopping 6*10^24 kilograms, but you can overcome its entire gravitational pull simply by lifting up your arm. It takes a lot of mass to make a decent gravitational field. Gravity is so bizarrely weak that there’s even a major program of active physics research devoted to understanding why. ![]() Even if gravity were a billion, billion, billion times stronger than it is, it would still be the weakest force of nature. ![]() ![]() It is, by far, the weakest of the four fundamental forces of nature. Read More: How Many Ways Can the Sun Kill Us?īut overall, gravity is exceedingly weak. Also, the more compact objects are, the more strongly they can bend spacetime.įor example, a typical black hole that isn’t much more massive than the Sun, but it’s compressed into such a small volume – only a few miles across – that it can create an event horizon, where nothing can escape from. Naturally, more massive and energetic objects bend spacetime more than less massive or energetic objects. The theory transformed our perspective of gravity from a simple property of objects relating to their mass, to a view of the cosmos where space and time can bend, flex and warp in the presence of massive objects.Īccording to general relativity, just about everything is capable of bending spacetime: anything with mass, energy, and tension. General RelativityĮinstein revolutionized our understanding of gravity with his magnum opus, the general theory of relativity. Technically, every single object in the universe with mass or energy emits a gravitational field, and scientists have been able to measure the gravitational field of objects far smaller than a human.
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