eli5 Does gravity act the same for large objects as it does for small objects. So if I were to shrink planet Earth and the moon to say half the size and the distance between them too then would they continue orbiting. Would this also apply if they somehow became much larger?
In: 9
If you kept the masses the same, it would not matter to the orbits of the moons or earth.
But the interesting thing is that how close you can get to the center of mass has extremely severe implications.
The closer you are to the center of mass the more intense you feel the pull of gravity.
In theory, if you magically shrunk all the mass of the earth to smaller than the size of a coin, all that mass would collapse into a black hole, which not even light can escape from. The moon would orbit the same, and it would orbit the same around the sun, but anything that got close to the earth would get ripped to shreds by gravity.
Likewise if you ballooned the earth out and some how managed to keep it structurally sound, you would experience less and less pull.
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