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Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician and physicist who lived from 1642-1727.
The legend is that Newton discovered Gravity when he saw a falling apple while thinking about the
forces of nature.
Whatever really happened, Newton realized that some force must be acting on falling objects like
apples because otherwise they would not start moving from rest.
Newton also realized that the moon would fly off away from Earth in a straight line tangent to its orbit
if some force was not causing it to fall toward the Earth. The moon is only a projectile circling around
the Earth under the attraction of Gravity.
Newton called this force "gravity" and determined that gravitational forces exist between all objects.
Using the idea of Gravity, Newton was able to explain the astronomical observations of Kepler.
The work of Galileo, Brahe, Kepler, and Newton proved once and for all that the Earth wasn't the
centre of the solar system. The Earth, along with all other planets, orbits around the sun.
Two astronomers, J.C. Adams and U.J.J. LeVerrier, later used the concept of Gravity to predict that
the planet Neptune would be discovered. They realized that there must be another planet exerting a
gravitational force on Uranus because Uranus had odd perturbations in its orbit. (Perturbations are
deviations in orbits.)
This is an example of the "inverse-square law": gravitational force varies as the inverse square of the
distance between the two objects. As a result, the effect of Gravity falls rapidly as the distance
increases between two objects.
The best current estimate of G is that it equals about 6.67259 10-11 newton-square meter per square
kilogram.
The gravitational field for a planet, g, equals GM/Rsquared, where G is the mass of the planet and R is
the distance of the object from the center of the planet (the planet's radius if the object is on the surface
of the planet). This means that Gravity is greater where a planet is more massive and where it has a
smaller radius. So even though Mars has only about 1/10th of the mass of the Earth, the gravitational
force on the surface of Mars is more than 1/10th that on the surface of the Earth -- because Mars'
surface is closer to the planet's surface!
The force of attraction between you and the Earth is your weight.
Gravity determines the "escape speed" for an object like a rocket. The stronger the gravitational pull of
the object, the larger the escape speed. The following chart shows the escape speed for the sun, two
planets, and the Earth's moon.