• Question: how does gravity work

    Asked by honey bee :-)😎 to Jake on 28 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Jake Langham

      Jake Langham answered on 28 Nov 2017:


      Some things in the universe have something called ‘mass’. Mass is measured in kilograms. Light objects like feathers or crisps have low mass. Heavy objects like pianos or black holes have high mass. Gravity is a force that acts to pull bits of mass together. The reason you fall back down when you jump in to the air is that you are pulled towards the large mass of the Earth by gravity. Also, the reason that the Earth doesn’t just float off into space is because it is pulled towards the Sun by gravity. You can calculate how much ‘pull’ there is using some maths that was discovered by Isaac Newton, who was the first scientist to properly understand the way the gravity works.

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      However…. if you want to know why things with mass pull on each other, then that’s a very tricky question. The answer is we just don’t know for sure. Scientists understand very well what gravity does, but not so much how it does it unfortunately.

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