I was watching a Vsauce video and learned that any two objects, like two baseballs, are attracted to each other because of their mass, and the bigger the mass, the more gravity an object has. What does mass have to do with gravity, and what causes gravity? Why does something just attract other things around it?
In: Physics
Good question. We don’t have an answer. At least, for the moment. Why does electric charge cause attraction/repulsion? Photons? Because it just does? At some point, the answer becomes “because we observe that it does”.
As for how mass effects gravity in a numerical sense, the acceleration that any object feels towards any other object is determined by GM/r^2 where G is the gravitational constant (a very small number) and M is the mass of the object that’s doing the attracting, while r is the distance between the centers of the objects.
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