• Question: Why is there no gravity in space ?

    Asked by cliodhnadwyer to Colm, Eoin, Joseph, Lauren, Stephen on 11 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Eoin O Colgain

      Eoin O Colgain answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      There is gravity in space. It is just a lot weaker. If we switched off the gravitational field of the sun all the other planets would be catapulted into deep space.

    • Photo: Lauren Mc Keown

      Lauren Mc Keown answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      There is gravity everywhere in space, but how strong it is depends on how close you are to the Sun and planets and all other objects out there.

      Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation tells us that every object in the Universe is attracted to each other with a force that depends on the product of the masses of the two objects, and the distance between these two masses. So if you have a very, very large distance between two objects in space or when you multiply their masses together and this value is small, the attractive force will also be very small. This is why when an object is in outer space, it will float as it is not close enough to planets to be attracted to them. A human on Earth has a tiny, tiny mass compared to the Earth and the distance between our feet and the Earth is quite small to say the least…so our feet stay firmly on the ground. Theoretically, if you were to drive off a very small asteroid for example, in the outer regions of space, you would probably keep on floating away.

    • Photo: colm bracken

      colm bracken answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      When we see astronauts floating in space it is not because there is no gravity. In fact gravity is still quite strong in the orbit of the space station. The trick is that they are moving really fast around the Earth so that for every bit they fall toward the Earth they move to the side by the same amount. And since the Earth is a ball shape they never get closer to the ground. They are actually falling around the Earth, as weird as that sounds.

    • Photo: Joseph Roche

      Joseph Roche answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      The other scientists have answered this better than I could. So I’ll just say…

      “Gravity… always getting me down.”

      8)

    • Photo: Stephen Scully

      Stephen Scully answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      I think the same as Joseph, so I will put pun too

      “Gravity, pulling us together.”

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