Gravity is a major player in the study of physical science. It is, of course, the force of gravity that causes objects to fall. One object always exerts a force of attraction on another object. This force of attraction is a pull, like the pull of gravity.
The sun, the earth, and the moon
The larger an object is, the greater is the force of its attraction. Consider the fact that the sun, which is much, much larger than the earth, can, even at 90 million miles away, hold the earth and the other eight planets in orbit.
The moon, on the other hand, is much smaller than the earth, and has only about one-sixth of the gravity of the earth. Astronauts who have walked on the moon feel light and weightless because there is very little gravity holding them down. On the other hand, if they were to go to Jupiter, which has much more gravity than the earth, they wouldn't even be able to lift a foot off the ground.
Who was Galileo Galilei?
It was Italian scientist Galileo Galilei who formulated the laws of accelerated motion and free-falling objects. He found that when an object is dropped and falls to the ground it has a falling rate of 9.8 meters per second, squared.
So, why do some objects fall faster than others?
You may wonder, then, why feathers float gently in the breeze instead of falling to the ground quickly, like a brick does.
Well, it's because the air offers much greater resistance to the falling motion of the feather than it does to the brick. The air is actually an upward force of friction, acting against gravity and slowing down the rate at which the feather falls.
The brick, on the other hand, can cut right through the air as if it didn't exist. Galileo discovered that objects that are more dense, or have more mass, fall at a faster rate than less dense objects, due to this air resistance.
A feather and brick dropped together. Air resistance causes the feather to fall more slowly.
If a feather and a brick were dropped together in a vacuum-that is, an area from which all air has been removed-they would fall at the same rate, and hit the ground at the same time.
Understanding these basic facts will help you to be able to answer the question of why some objects fall faster than others.
Test this theory yourself!
You can test the rate at which various objects fall, noting both the mass of each object, and how long it takes for it to fall. Be sure to drop all objects from the same height, and be careful to use only objects that can't break. Record all your information in a journal, and chart your results.
The simplest answer is: no, an object's weight usually will not change its falling speed. For example, you can test this by dropping a bowling ball and a basketball from the same height at the same time--they should fall at the same speed and land at the same time.
But that's not always true if there is a lot of drag such as air resistance. Air resistance happens because objects bump into lots of air molecules as they fall. The air molecules get knocked away and take some of the kinetic energy away from the object, which makes the object slow down. For example, if you drop a styrofoam cup and a metal cup the same way, the metal cup might reach the ground first. This is because the weight of the metal cup gives it more inertia, which makes forces like drag affect it less.
Sometimes, people will use their knowledge of air resistance to make things move faster or slower. Parachutes are designed to have a lot of air resistance and fall as slow as possible. On the other hand, the noses of planes are designed to "cut through the air," which is a way of saying they have low air resistance.
Answer 2:In physics, no - all objects fall at exactly the same rate. However, air slows down falling objects, so on Earth (or any planet with an atmosphere) a heavier object will reach the ground in less time. To see what happens to falling objects without air, watch this video:
In real life, heavier objects sometimes fall faster than light objects, but not because of gravity. Gravity makes all objects increase their speed at the same rate, regardless of how big they are. But if you drop 2 things outside, the air molecules may slow down one thing more than another.
For instance, a rock will be slowed down less by the air molecules than a feather because of their different shapes. But if you drop a rock and a feather in a vacuum, which is somewhere without any air, then they will fall at the same exact speed. The experiment of dropping things in a vacuum has actually been done and it has shown that they objects do fall at the same rate.
Answer 4:Some times. In the absence of air resistance, all objects will accelerate towards the source of gravity with the same rate. This was nicely demonstrated on the moon when an astronaut dropped a feather and a hammer, and they both took the same time to fall towards the surface of the moon.
On Earth, there is much more atmosphere than on the moon (which is very convenient for sustaining life, I might add), so air resistance becomes important in some cases. For objects with very low density or with very high surface area (such as a feather, or a kite), the air might exert a strong enough force to slow the descent of an object, or even lift it up if the wind is blowing strongly enough. (Things like dust can stay floating for a long time if the particles are small enough.)
So, if you're on Earth where objects are falling through air, a heavier object may fall faster than a similarly-sized lighter object, but it usually won't be noticeable to us because the effect is often quite small for most things we deal with in practice. (That is to say, bigger than a tennis ball, and falling from a height of ~1-10 feet)