Ok, first of all, I'm in college, I'm not stupid, I've taken physics, so I'm not a total noob, but I have some questions that I came across when I was doing a lab in my calculus class.
If a baseball and a ping pong ball are dropped at the same place on earth, with no air resistance, they will fall at the same speed and land at the same time. This is what I disagree with/am confused about.
They fall at the same speed because of the earth's gravitational constant (the earth pulls everything equally) no matter what the size/shape/mass of the object is. This is only for earth. On the moon, the gravity is different, thus the constant and the acceleration would be different, correct?
Well doesn't everything that has a mass have gravity? And isn't the amount of gravity something has proportional to how much mass it has?
Say an apple falls from 100 feet. It will land in a specific amount of time. Say an orange is dropped also from a 100 feet. It will land in the same amount of time. But say there is an object that is the size of an orange but has the mass of the sun, thus has the gravitational pull of the sun. If that was "dropped" from a hundred feet from the earth, would it hit at the same time as the orange and apple did? Wouldn't it not, since the earth is pulling on it but it is also pulling on the earth with a tremendous amount of force?
Now back to the fact that everything with mass has gravity. The baseball and the ping pong ball have different masses, thus different amounts of gravity, and although this difference is negligible because the earth's mass/gravity is like a billion times bigger/stronger than the objects', wouldn't the objects fall at SLIGHTLY different times because of the fact that they have different masses? The earth pulls on all objects the same, but the objects don't pull back with the same force.
That is what I thought. Please give me your input.
