Quote:
Originally Posted by Crowbob
So any object that has mass has gravity, right? The more mass, the more gravity.
So my question involves a scenario wherein there is a spherical open space at the center of the earth, somehow. Would an object in that sphere be weightless?
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mass is a property of matter
gravity is a force that interacts w/ mass and obeys the inverse square relation where the effect of the closest and largest mass has by far the most effect.
unbalanced forces cause acceleration
the earth isn't a sphere, it is an oblate spheroid but if a motionless mass were placed at the center of a theoretical hollow sphere of uniform mass all the local gravitational forced would sum to zero. However the non local gravitational forces would still be present and in the universe we live in w/ distributed mass concentrations, at random distances and directions, these would not sum to zero
there are places in the real universe where all the gravitational forces sum to and effective zero for long enough periods of time, these are called LaGrange points.
The math gets really complicated but for a 2 body system, say, like the Earth and moon there are 5 LaGrange points
