

If the planet you are standing on is twice as massive, gravity also pulls on you twice as hard. If you double your mass, gravity pulls on you twice as hard. First, it depends on your mass and the mass of the planet you are standing on. This force of gravity depends on a few things. The Relationship Between Gravity and Mass and DistanceĪs stated above, your weight is a measure of the pull of gravity between you and the body you are standing on. It still has inertia, and hence mass, yet it has no weight. If you grabbed the anvil and tried to shake it, you would have to push it to get it going and pull it to get it to stop. Are you or the anvil mass-less? Absolutely not. If you are in a spaceship far between the stars and you put a scale underneath you, the scale would read zero. This force of attraction between you and the Earth (or any other planet) is called your weight. How? All you have to do is stand on a scale! Scales measure the force of attraction between you and the Earth. For everyday-sized objects, this gravitational pull is vanishingly small, but the pull between a very large object, like the Earth, and another object, like you, can be easily measured. The amount of attraction depends on the size of the masses and how far apart they are. Every object in the universe with mass attracts every other object with mass. Mass is a measure of how much inertia an object displays. This quality or "sluggishness" of matter is its inertia. Once you've got it moving, it wants to stay moving. If the stone is at rest, it wants to remain at rest. If you shake an object like a stone in your hand, you would notice that it takes a push to get it moving, and another push to stop it again. An object with mass has a quality called inertia.

The mass of a body is a measure of how much matter it contains. We often use the terms "mass" and "weight" interchangeably in our daily speech, but to an astronomer or a physicist they are completely different things.

Before we get into the subject of gravity and how it acts, it's important to understand the difference between weight and mass.
