GRAVITATIONAL ATTRACTION TASK

Gravity is important! Without Gravity everything would be floating including us. For our Solar System Gravity pulled together dust, particles,and gas all together to form planets!

Even though gravity helps us and many different things, it can also affect different things. For example, in our Solar System there are eight different planets. Mercury being the closet, Jupiter right in the middle, and Neptune the farthest away. The closer the planet the more gravitational pull to the sun! Which is why Mercury is so close to the Sun, and stays at that location.

MASS

• The Suns mass is 1.9891 times 10 to the 30th power in Kilograms!
• Mercury's exact mass is 330 times 10 to the 23rd power in Kilogram!
• Jupiter's exact mass is 1.9 times 10 to the 27th power in Kilograms!
• Neptune's exact mass is 1.02 times 10 to the 26th power in Kilograms!

The bigger the Sun's mass and the lower the planets mass,the faster the planet it will orbit in one year. For example, Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. But its mass is equivalent to Earth! So it would take a longer time to orbit in one year then other planets.

On the other hand, Mercury being the closest to the sun out of eight planets will orbit the fastest. Why? Again, this is happening because the closer the planet to the sun the faster it will orbit because the gravitational pull is greater.

All of that information was in real life. Now I'm going to talk about the My Solar System simulation. Again I am going to talk about how the mass of the Sun and planets affect the time it will orbit in one year. Let's say that the sun has a mass of 200, and the planet has a mass of 10. The exact time it would orbit in one year would be 8.4 seconds! Now let's say the Sun has a mass of 200 and the planets mass is also 200. It would orbit 3.3 seconds in one year! That's a big difference! So this data proves that the higher the Sun's mass and the lower the planets mass, will take a longer time to orbit in one year.

GRAVITATIONAL ATTRACTION

• So basically Gravity is extremely important. Gravity has a bigger affect on Mercury than Neptune. The overall message is, the closer the planet to the sun, the higher gravitational pull.

CREDITS

• http://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/8316/what-is-the-exact-mass-of... http://www.space.com/18647-how-big-is-mercury.html http://www.universetoday.com/15141/mass-of-jupiter/ http://www.universetoday.com/21651/mass-of-neptune/ http://www.universetoday.com/35565/gravity-on-other-planets