Your Weight On Other Planets
Do you know that your weight differs from planet to planet? Let’s know how the weights of objects on the Earth will change in other planets. Weight is the force gravity exerts on an object due to its mass.
Mass measures an object’s inertia, its resistance to being moved or stopped when it is in motion. Some studies say that our mass remains constant across the universe. But the fact is your weight changes depending on the gravitational forces acting on you. And of course, the gravitational force varies from planet to planet.
We know, according to Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation, all the objects having mass attracts each other.
They pull with a force which is
i) directly proportional to the product of the masses of the two objects
ii) inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers.
If the gravity linearly increases with the mass of the object, it decreases exponentially with the increase in the distance between the objects. This phenomenon is called as “Inverse-Square law”. The distance, while calculating the surface gravity, is the space between you and the mass of the center of the planet. The size of the planet has relatively a greater impact on the gravity and your weight on the surface of the planet than the mass of the planet.
Know how to calculate the mass of an object on all the planets:
- Mercury: 0.38
- Venus: 0.91
- Earth: 1.00
- Mars: 0.38
- Jupiter: 2.34
- Saturn: 1.06
- Uranus: 0.92
- Neptune: 1.09
- Pluto: 0.06
For calculating the mass of an object on a planet, we use the formula: “Weight = Mass x Surface gravity”. To know your weight on other planets, multiply your weight on Earth with the numbers given above for each planet. This will give you your weight on the surface of each planet. If you weigh 68 kilograms on Earth, your weight on Jupiter would be 159 kg and 26 kg on Mars and 4 kg on Pluto.
We can see from above that Mercury and Mars have the same proportional gravity. However, Mars is almost twice the mass of Mercury. Mars’ superior size is 1.4 times the diameter of Mercury.
Uranus and Venus present an even more striking example of the Inverse-Square law phenomenon. Uranus is almost 17.8 times the mass of Venus, it has 4.2-times larger diameter. But it eliminates the difference in proportional surface gravity of both the planets.
This way we can calculate our weight on other planets of the Solar System. Generally, no one will have a thought that our weights might vary in each of the planets depending on the gravity of the planet.
You May Also Like: Best Tips to Stay Cool and Healthy in this Summer
