• Question: WHAT IS GRAVITY?

    Asked by BUMBLE BEE to Deborah, Euan, Maheen, Rob, Stu on 14 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Rob Stanley

      Rob Stanley answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      Gravity is a force that pulls two objects together. Everything makes gravity, but it’s very weak, so you need a big object like the Earth to make enough gravity to pull you close!

    • Photo: Deborah Prunty

      Deborah Prunty answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      Like Rob says, gravity is the force of attraction between two objects. You need something really big, or really dense to have a big enough gravity for us to notice it though as we are used to Earth’s gravity which is quite high.

    • Photo: Euan Allen

      Euan Allen answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      Hi BUMBLE BEE,

      As Rob and Deborah has said before, gravity is the force that is created when this with mass (i.e. things that are made of atoms) come close to other things with mass. It’s the force that keeps the planets going around the sun, lets you cycle downhill easily and is the reason you don’t fly off the planet when it spins.

      What actually causes gravity is one of the big unknown’s in physics, and is one of the things that they are trying to discover at the Large Hadron Collider (CERN), which you might have seen or heard about on the TV. They made a huge step a few years ago when they discovered the Higgs Boson, which is the particle that gives things mass in the first place!

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