yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Is There Gravity In Space?


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Have you ever looked up into the night sky and wondered what it would be like to be an astronaut floating around in the space station?

Why are the astronauts floating? There's weightlessness in space. You can experience the kind of weightlessness.

Why? Why are they weightless though? Is there a gravitational force on them? Yeah, but I guess it's probably really weak. Not on the astronauts, 'cause they just float around. It's like they'd float away if it wasn't for the walls of the space station, right? 'Cause they're outside of Earth's gravitational pull.

Oh, I see what you've done here. I see what you've done here, that's clever. H. 'Cause now I want to say that they're outside of Earth's gravitational pull, but I just said that the moon wasn't. You got me, well played.

Think about this: the space station is only about 400 km away. So if you're in Sydney, it's about, well, a little further than the drive to Camra. Do you really think that the Earth exerts a big gravitational pull on you, but nothing on the astronauts a short distance away?

Well, the truth is this: the force on the astronauts is almost as much as the force on you. So why are they floating while you're stuck here? The answer is the astronauts aren't floating; they're falling.

And not only that, but the space station that they're in is falling as well. So why doesn't the space station come crashing into the Earth?

Well, the reason is the space station and the astronauts have a huge sideways velocity of nearly 28,000 km/h. So, even though they're falling towards the Earth, they're going so fast that as they fall towards the Earth, the Earth's surface curves away from them, and therefore they never get any closer.

So the space station and the astronauts inside are constantly accelerating towards the Earth's center, but they never get any closer. And because both objects are accelerating at the same rate, the astronauts feel weightless. They have this amazing sensation of floating.

More Articles

View All
Semicolons and complex lists | The colon and semicolon | Punctuation | Khan Academy
Hello grammarians! So, if you’ve ever written a list of items or actions, you know that we use commas to separate the elements of that list. Sometimes, though, our lists get a bit complicated, and we have something called a complex list. When that’s the …
Origins of agriculture | World History | Khan Academy
This timeline here covers 200,000 years, from 200,000 years into the past to the present. Just to get a sense of the scale of this, if we were to go 2,000 years ago to the time of the Roman Empire, that would be roughly here on the timeline. If I were to …
Tracing variables | Intro to CS - Python | Khan Academy
What happens when you assign, reassign, or access a variable in a program? Let’s trace the execution of a program with variables to find out. When the program starts running, the computer loads the first instruction into its working memory. This instruct…
The First Wave - Trailer | National Geographic
I have to keep it together. I have kids who can’t see me fall apart. He has to come home; he has no choice. I just let my fear be my strength because I know one day I’m gonna be with my wife and my baby. It is because of you that we are gonna make it thr…
THE END of Credit Card Signup Bonuses??
Lots of you guys, it’s Graham here. So, you know, unfortunately, I have a little bit of bad news today. You know when you find a way to outsmart and exploit the system for a profit? Eventually, the credit card companies are gonna start to catch on to this…
Socially efficient and inefficient outcomes
Let’s study the market for soda a little bit. So, we’re going to draw our traditional axes. So that is price, and that is quantity. We have seen our classic supply and demand curves. So, this could be our upward sloping supply curve. At a low price, not a…