No matter how old are you, it is always fun playing with a ball. But have you ever imagined how it would be like playing across our solar system?
Planetary scientist Dr James O’Donoghue has come up with an amusing visualisation of how an object falls onto the surfaces of Sun, Earth, Ceres, Jupiter, the Moon, and Pluto.
In the video, a ball drops from 1 kilometre (0.6 miles) to the surface of each object, with zero air resistance. For instance, it requires 2.7 seconds for a ball to drop on the Sun, while it takes 14.3 seconds on Earth.
“This should give an idea for the pull you would feel on each object,” O’Donoghue said. Other major planets were also compared to the Earth; for instance, it takesv13.8 seconds for the ball to drop on Saturn and 15 seconds on Uranus.
“It might be surprising to see large planets have a pull comparable to smaller ones at the surface,” O’Donoghue explains on YouTube.
“For example, Uranus pulls the ball down slower than at Earth! Why? Because the low average density of Uranus puts the surface far away from the majority of the mass. Similarly, Mars is nearly twice the mass of Mercury, but you can see the surface gravity is actually the same… this indicates that Mercury is much denser than Mars.”
Ceres plays at the tiniest place, with a ball dropping of 1 km (0.6 miles) in 84.3 seconds.
The video is created using NASA’s planetary fact sheet and the help of Rami Mandow, a fellow astronomer.
In addition, O’Donoghue also mentioned the notorious gravity experiment conducted by Dave Scott. It is still considered one of the most spectacular gravity experiments ever conducted on the Moon.
Dr James has a YouTube channel featuring videos on several interesting concepts, including the velocities required to avoid the pull of gravity from a variety of bodies in the Solar System.
This article was originally published by Universe Today.