Gravitational acceleration
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In physics, gravitational acceleration is the acceleration of an object caused by the force of gravity from another object. In the absence of any other forces, any object will accelerate in a gravitational field at the same rate, regardless of the mass of the object. On the surface of the Earth, all objects fall with an acceleration of somewhere between 9.78 and 9.82 m/s² depending on latitude, with a conventional standard value of exactly 9.80665 m/s², (approx. 32.174 ft/s2).
The gravitational acceleration towards an object is given by:
-
.
where:
- m is the mass of an object,
- r is the distance from center of the object to the location we are considering,
is the unit length vector from center of the object to the location we are considering,- G is the gravitational constant of the universe.
