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Royal Observatory Greenwich
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These resources have been reviewed and selected by STEM Learning’s team of education specialists for factual accuracy and relevance to teaching STEM subjects in UK schools.
What is gravity and how is it calculated?
This resource, from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, introduces students to how our understanding of gravity has changed over time, and what this means for the gravitational field strength of different bodies in our galaxy.
The short video introduces how Newton's theory of gravity is excellent most of the time (including all of the experiments we are likely to do in a school setting), but that Einstein's theories are better explanations for some extreme cases (such as Mercury's orbital length and gravitational lensing), which can only be explained by considering that space and time must bend.
This is accompanied by two student activities where students can calculate how the weight of a cat would change as it moves around planets in the solar system, and what happens to the gravitational field strength around a black hole.
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