Newton's Law of Gravitation
The figure below shows a schematic of the Earth and the Moon. They are representative of any two bodies attracted toward each other due to gravity.
Simply based on the diagram labels, it starts to become clear that the gravitational pull between the Earth and the Moon seems to depend on the mass of each body and the distance between their respective centers.The gravitational force between any two objects having masses m1 and m2 and separated by a distance, r, can be found by the following formula: Where:
G = universal gravitation constant
in SI units
in U.S. Customary unitsCopyright © 1998 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. All Rights Reserved.