• Question: what makes gravity pull?

    Asked by Lynx Rufus to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 15 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Jillian Scudder

      Jillian Scudder answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Man, if only we knew! Right now we have a descriptive understanding of gravity- in that we can describe it really well as functioning like warps and bends in space itself. But as for -why- it works the way it does, we’re still working on that. It could be there’s a force particle called a graviton that does the pulling, but that’s guessing at this stage, and we’re still confused why gravity is the only force that doesn’t also push.

    • Photo: Sarah Beasley

      Sarah Beasley answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Hi 🙂 Einstein came up with a theory called ‘Spacetime’, which is something that can actually be ‘bent’ by anything with mass.

      Imagine a huge piece of cling film stretched out. Now imagine putting golf balls across it, eventually they would make themselves a nice little groove in the cling film and sit there. That’s kind of the image used for planets in Space. They actually bend Spacetime, and that’s what we refer to as gravity.

    • Photo: Lidunka Vocadlo

      Lidunka Vocadlo answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Mass. The larger the mass of something, the bigger the pull of gravity. That and how close together two objects are – the closer together they are the bigger the pull too.

    • Photo: Steven Thomson

      Steven Thomson answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      I can’t add much that the others haven’t said already! As Jillian says, no one really knows for sure – we know that any object with mass causes space to actually bend, but we don’t really know why. Bigger mass means that space bends more, and that bending is what we feel as gravity.

      A lot of people are working on figuring out how gravity works, looking for particles called gravitons that carry the force of gravity, or watching the movements of far-off stars and galaxies to see if we can figure out why gravity makes them move the way they do. It’s a good question, and hopefully some say we’ll know the answer!

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