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A set of equations describing the trajectories of objects subject to a constant gravitational force under normal Earth-bound conditions.Assuming constant acceleration g due to Earth's gravity, Newton's law of universal gravitation simplifies to F = mg, where F is the force exerted on a mass m by the Earth's gravitational field of strength g.
where F 12 is the force on mass 1 due to its interactions with mass 2, and F 21 is the force on mass 2 due to its interactions with mass 1. The two dots on top of the x position vectors denote their second derivative with respect to time, or their acceleration vectors.
It is the most familiar of the theories of physics. The concepts it covers, such as mass, acceleration, and force, are commonly used and known. [2] The subject is based upon a three-dimensional Euclidean space with fixed axes, called a frame of reference. The point of concurrency of the three axes is known as the origin of the particular space. [3]
In the absence of a net external force, the center of mass moves at a constant speed in a straight line. This applies, for example, to a collision between two bodies. [53] If the total external force is not zero, then the center of mass changes velocity as though it were a point body of mass . This follows from the fact that the internal forces ...
For points inside a spherically symmetric distribution of matter, Newton's shell theorem can be used to find the gravitational force. The theorem tells us how different parts of the mass distribution affect the gravitational force measured at a point located a distance r 0 from the center of the mass distribution: [13]
The n-body problem considers n point masses m i, i = 1, 2, …, n in an inertial reference frame in three dimensional space ℝ 3 moving under the influence of mutual gravitational attraction. Each mass m i has a position vector q i. Newton's second law says that mass times acceleration m i d 2 q i / dt 2 is equal to the sum of the ...
In classical mechanics, the central-force problem is to determine the motion of a particle in a single central potential field.A central force is a force (possibly negative) that points from the particle directly towards a fixed point in space, the center, and whose magnitude only depends on the distance of the object to the center.
In physics, reduced mass is a measure of the effective inertial mass of a system with two or more particles when the particles are interacting with each other. Reduced mass allows the two-body problem to be solved as if it were a one-body problem. Note, however, that the mass determining the gravitational force is not reduced.