Galileo once proposed that all objects under gravity, whether they’re really heavy or really light, will fall and accelerate downwards at the same rate. In a famous experiment, he supposedly dropped both from the Leaning Tower of Pisa and proved it. Why is this true? For something with more mass, it does feel a stronger
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In the vast emptiness of space, there are floating clouds of gas and dust called nebulae. These clouds are stellar nurseries, filled with material that will one day become multiple solar systems. When part of a nebula is slightly more densely packed than the rest, gravity is stronger in that region. It begins to pull
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Black holes are a confusing topic in astronomy. You’ve heard about them starting from a young age, but whenever you ask someone for more information about them, there’s a whole lot of “I dunno”s. The truth is, black holes have been romanticized by science fiction, when in fact they are nothing more than an oddity
Read moreA common misconception we see at AstroCamp is how gravity and atmospheric pressure work. It makes sense! The two seem interchangeable at a glance, however they both get weaker as altitude increases, and there can’t even be an atmosphere without gravity. Despite their similarities, the two are very different. Gravity is a property of anything
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Escape Velocity is probably something you’ve heard on a TV show, or maybe you learned about it from NASA talking about their newest spacecraft. It is a commonly discussed term, but it isn’t the easiest thing to understand. Imagine you’re in a strange universe where only the Earth exists. The only gravity comes from its center,
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There’s an old story of Newton sitting underneath a tree during his studies, when an apple fell and hit him on the head, leading him to begin his adventures into solving the mysteries of gravity. While it’s doubtful that this fanciful tale actually happened, it is true that Newton had an incredibly significant impact on
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In the video above, I talk about how pendulums actually work. If you haven’t watched it, the principle is simple: an object is suspended from a fixed point and allowed to swing back and forth – the mass of the object and the time it takes to swing back and forth are independent of each
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The conservation of linear momentum is easy to see, especially when you play billiards! Collisions or impacts are great examples of the conservation of momentum. But have you ever experienced the conservation of angular momentum? If you are a very talented ice skater, then the answer is probably yes, but for the rest of us
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Did you know that stars live and die just like other living things?…Okay, maybe not just like them. But they do have a beginning, middle, and end. All stars start out the same way, from a nebula. A nebula, otherwise known as a “star nursery”, is a cloud of gas and dust out in space. Nebulae
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Most of us have experienced using a lens in some way, whether it was using glasses, cameras, or our favorite, telescopes. A lens is a piece of glass or other transparent substance with curved sides for concentrating or dispersing light rays. They have the ability to bend light! Did you know that gravity can bend light
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We have all experienced bubbles in our day to day lives, whether its blowing bubbles outside on a summer day, seeing bubbles in the soda that you drink, or blowing through your straw. It’s just a thin sphere of liquid enclosing air or some other type of gas, but what is an anti-bubble? As you
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Heat rises, boats float, clouds hang listlessly in the sky, and icebergs aimlessly bob around the ocean. All of these things happen because of the same scientific property: density! Density is a rather simple property. It depends on two things, mass and volume. Mass is basically how much something weighs, but something still has the
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