Comment on your mom falls significantly faster than g
noisefree@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This may be a stupid question, but: assuming an object (the bowling ball) is created from materials found on Earth and that it remains within the gravity well of Earth from material procurement stage to the point where it is dropped, wouldn’t the acceleration of the Earth towards the object be kind of a null considering the whole timeline of events? I mean, I get the distinction of higher mass objects technically causing the Earth to accelerate towards them faster if we’re talking a feather vs a bowling ball that both originated somewhere else before encountering Earth’s gravity well in a vacuum, it just seems kind of weird to consider Earth’s acceleration towards objects that originating and staying within its gravity well?
BB84@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
I didn’t think about that! If the object was taken from earth then indeed the total acceleration between it and earth would be G M_total / r^2, regardless of the mass of the object.