Gravitation
hideGravitation is a natural phenomenon by which objects with mass attract one another. In everyday life, gravitation is most commonly thought of as the agency which lends weight to objects with mass. Gravitation compels dispersed matter to coalesce, thus accounting for the existence of the Earth, the Sun, and most of the macroscopic objects in the universe. It is responsible for keeping the Earth and the other planets in their orbits around the Sun; for keeping the Moon in its orbit around the Earth; for the formation of tides; for convection, by which fluid flow occurs under the influence of a temperature gradient and gravity; for heating the interiors of forming stars and planets to very high temperatures; and for various other phenomena observed on Earth. Modern physics describes gravitation using the general theory of relativity, in which gravitation is a consequence of the curvature of spacetime which governs the motion of inertial objects. The simpler Newton's law of universal gravitation provides an accurate approximation for most calculations.
The terms gravitation and gravity are mostly interchangeable in everyday use, but a distinction is made in scientific circles. "Gravitation" is a general term describing the phenomenon by which bodies with mass are attracted to one another, while "gravity" refers specifically to the net force exerted by the Earth on objects in its vicinity as well as by other factors, such as the Earth's rotation.
For more information about Gravitation, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
News tagged with gravity
ISS astronauts land safely in Kazakhstan
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Dec 01, 2009 |
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A space capsule carrying a Belgian, a Canadian and a Russian landed safely in the steppes of Kazakhstan on Tuesday after the trio spent half a year on the International Space Station (ISS).
New Law of Physics Could Explain Quantum Mysteries
Aug 17, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Since the early days of quantum mechanics, scientists have been trying to understand the many strange implications of the theory: superpositions, wave-particle duality, and the observer’s ...
Do we need dark matter?
Nov 12, 2009 |
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It's the biggest problem in physics: the matter we can see in the universe accounts for just five per cent of the observed gravity that holds galaxies together.
Dark Matter in a Galaxy
Oct 30, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Stars, the most familiar objects in the night sky, make up only a tiny percentage of the total amount of matter in the universe -- about 2%.
Gamma-ray photon race ends in dead heat; Einstein wins this round
Oct 28, 2009 |
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Racing across the universe for the last 7.3 billion years, two gamma-ray photons arrived at NASA's orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope within nine-tenths of a second of one another. The dead-heat finish ...
Spacetime May Have Fractal Properties on a Quantum Scale
Mar 25, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Usually, we think of spacetime as being four-dimensional, with three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. However, this Euclidean perspective is just one of many possible multi-dimensional ...
Can R2 gravity explain dark matter?
Apr 20, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- "In many ways, the standard model of cosmology works very well," Jose Cembranos tells PhysOrg. "However, there are very basic features that we just do not know. We have dark energy and dark matter. They d ...
Bouncing atoms may be the key to the future of gravimetry
Apr 27, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- When studying cold atoms, scientists often use magnetic or optical traps to keep the atoms in place. However, in some cases experimentalists want to study free atoms, avoiding the effects of a trap. "One ...
Is Everything Made of Mini Black Holes?
May 18, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- In trying to understand how gravity behaves on the quantum scale, physicists have developed a model that has an interesting implication: mini black holes could be everywhere, and all particles ...
Invisible hand in invisible matter
Oct 06, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- An international team of astronomers have found an unexpected link between mysterious 'dark matter' and the visible stars and gas in galaxies that could revolutionise our current understanding ...
A Theory of Dark Matter
Sep 08, 2009 |
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Among the most astounding, unexpected, and important achievements of the past century (or even more) have been the discoveries of dark matter and dark energy, collectively dubbed the "dark sector."
The Edge of a Black Hole
Aug 18, 2009 |
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The existence of black holes is one of the most amazing and bizarre predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity. Despite his original misgivings about their reality, massive black hole holes are today believed ...
Mice Levitated for Space Research
Sep 11, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists have managed to levitate young mice in research carried out for NASA. Levitated mice may help research on bone density loss during long exposures to low gravity, such as in space ...
Researchers propose new way to reproduce a black hole
Aug 21, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Despite their popularity in the science fiction genre, there is much to be learned about black holes, the mysterious regions in space once thought to be absent of light. In a paper published in the August ...
Study plunges standard Theory of Cosmology into Crisis
May 05, 2009 |
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As modern cosmologists rely more and more on the ominous “dark matter” to explain otherwise inexplicable observations, much effort has gone into the detection of this mysterious substance in the last two decades, yet no direct ...
