Planetary Weights

Check your weight on other worlds!

 

Directions:

Enter your weight here

The Planets
MERCURY

Your weight is
VENUS

Your weight is
THE MOON

Your weight is
MARS

Your weight is

JUPITER

Your weight is
SATURN

Your weight is
URANUS

Your weight is
NEPTUNE

Your weight is

PLUTO

Your weight is

The Moons of Jupiter
IO

Your weight is
EUROPA

Your weight is
GANYMEDE

Your weight is
CALLISTO

Your weight is

A Few Different Types of Stars
(better land at night to avoid burning your feet!)
THE SUN

Your weight is
A WHITE DWARF

Your weight is
A NEUTRON STAR

Your weight is

Background:

Mass and Weight

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

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. The mass of a body is a measure of how much matter it contains. A object with mass has a quality called inertia. 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. If the stone is at rest, it wants to remain at rest. Once you've got it moving, it wants to stay moving. This quality or "sluggishness" of matter is its inertia. Mass is a measure of how much inertia an object displays.

Weight is an entirely different thing. Every object in the universe with mass attracts every other object with mass. The amount of attraction depends on the size of the masses and how far apart they are. 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. How? All you have to do is stand on a scale! Scales measure the force of attraction between you and the Earth. This force of attraction between you and the Earth (or any other planet) is called your weight.

If you are in a spaceship far between the stars and you put a scale underneath you, the scale would read zero. Your weight is zero. You are weightless. There is an anvil floating next to you. It's also weightless. Are you or the anvil mass-less? Absolutely not. 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. It still has inertia, and hence mass, yet it has no weight. See the difference?

The Relationship Between Gravity and Mass and Distance

As stated above, your weight is a measure of the pull of gravity between you and the body you are standing on. This force of gravity depends on a few things. First, it depends on your mass and the mass of the planet you are standing on. If you double your mass, gravity pulls on you twice as hard. If the planet you are standing on is twice as massive, gravity also pulls on you twice as hard. On the other hand, the farther you are from the center of the planet, the weaker the pull between the planet and your body. The force gets weaker quite rapidly. If you double your distance from the planet, the force is one-fourth. If you triple your seperation, the force drops by one-ninth. Ten times the distance, one-hundredth the force. See the pattern? The force drops off with the square of the distance. If we put this into an equation it would look like this:

The two "M's" on top are your mass and the planet's mass. The "r" below is the distance from the center of the planet. The masses are in the numerator because the force gets bigger if they get bigger. The distance is in the denominator because the force gets smaller when the distance gets bigger. Note that the force never becomes zero no matter how far you travel.

 

  This equation, first derived by Sir Isaac Newton, tells us a lot. For instance, you may suspect that because Jupiter is 318 times as massive as the Earth, you should weigh 318 times what you weigh on Earth. This would be true if Jupiter was the same size as the Earth, but Jupiter is 10 times the diameter of the Earth, so you are further from the center, reducing the pull to about 2.6 times the pull of Earth on you. Also, standing on a neutron star, makes you unimaginably weighty because not only is the star very massive to start with (about the same as the Sun), but it is also incredibly small (about the size of San Francisco), so you are very close to the center and r is a very small number.

 

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