• Question: how do you know if there is gravity on another planet

    Asked by 332grak44 to Daniel, Hannah, Maggie, Ry, Scott on 15 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Hannah Middleton

      Hannah Middleton answered on 15 Nov 2017:

      There’s definitely gravity on other planets. Wherever there’s some mass, there will be some gravity and when we send space probes to other planets they experience the gravitational pull of the planet. If it’s a more massive planet, the gravity is stronger and if it is less massive, the gravity is weaker. On the moon, gravity is about 6 times weaker than on the Earth.

      Without gravity, planets and stars would not be able to form!

    • Photo: Maggie Lieu

      Maggie Lieu answered on 15 Nov 2017:

      All planets have mass so they will all have gravity but the amount depends on how much mass the planet has

    • Photo: Ry Cutter

      Ry Cutter answered on 15 Nov 2017:

      We can see there moons and rings!
      We used the moons around Jupiter as one of the first tests of gravity. Seeing how big the moons are and how they move lets us estimate the gravity of Jupiter.
      Saturn is also cool, it’s gravity is why the rings exist. It’s one of the first examples of a ‘disc like’ structure being built by gravity.
      We think discs around other stars are where new planets are created!
      Great Question,
      Ryan 🙂

    • Photo: Scott Melville

      Scott Melville answered on 16 Nov 2017:

      Good question! We see the other planets orbiting the Sun just like the Earth does, so it certainly looks like they have the same kind of gravity (it’s a bit stronger or weaker depending how much mass the planet has though). Even outside the solar system, we see exoplanets orbiting other stars, so we know they have gravity too 🙂

Comments