What makes heavier objects fall faster

You can feel a force on your hand if you place it out the window of a moving car. Root question: Which falls more quickly in free fall, a feather or a hammer? See answer here. Does mass change the acceleration of the object if gravity is the only force acting on it? If you shoot a bullet parallel to the ground and at the exact same moment, from the exact same height, which will hit the ground first?

Assume the bullet does not hit anything What makes a feather fall slower on earth than a hammer? Target response: Both objects fall at the same speed.

Mass does not affect the speed of falling objects, assuming there is only gravity acting on it. Both bullets will strike the ground at the same time.

However, this doesn't not mean that either object will fall faster. We can see from this equation that even though a heavier object will experience a stronger force due to gravity, its acceleration will be the same as the lighter one since the force is also divided by the mass of the object.

As you can see, the acceleration of each object will be the same and we can say with confidence that if they are both dropped at the same time, their speeds will be the same. Thank you for your curiosity Aiden. Are your objects in a vacuum or are they in a fluid?

First off, what is a vacuum? A vacuum is a space with absolutely no matter in it : so no air, no water, nothing. Next, what's a fluid? A fluid is something that doesn't have a fixed shape and flows easily. Something like water or the air we breathe is a fluid. If your heavy and light objects are in a vacuum, then they fall at the same speed. This is because they only have one force acting on them: gravity.

On the other hand, if your objects are in a fluid, then you'll clearly see that's not the case. If you have a rock in one hand and a piece a paper in the other, the rock clearly hits the ground before the paper fluttering down does. Why is that? It's because now there is more than one force acting on the objects. Not only do you have gravity pulling down on the objects, you now have the fluid resisting the movement against it.

In the late s in Italy the famous scientist Galileo was asking some of these same questions. And he did some experiments to answer them. In this activity you'll do some of your own tests to determine whether heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones.

Background In fourth-century B. Greece the philosopher Aristotle theorized that the speed at which an object falls is probably relative to its mass. In other words, if two objects are the same size but one is heavier, the heavier one has greater density than the lighter object. Therefore, when both objects are dropped from the same height and at the same time, the heavier object should hit the ground before the lighter one.

Is this true? Some 1, years later, in late 16th-century Italy, the young scientist and mathematician Galileo Galilei questioned Aristotle's theories of falling objects. He even performed several experiments to test Aristotle's theories. As legend has it, in Galileo stood on a balcony near the top of the Tower of Pisa and dropped two balls that were the same size but had different densities.

Although there is debate about whether this actually happened, the story emphasizes the importance of using experimentation to test scientific theories, even ones that had been accepted for nearly 2, years. For example, you could use a metal and a rubber ball or a wooden and a plastic ball, as long as the two balls are about the same size. The idea that a heavy object falls faster does seem to agree with our everyday observations. Try this. Take a baseball and a ping pong ball and drop them together.

It will probably be closer than you think but the heavier baseball will indeed hit the ground first. Your initial thoughts would be confirmed. Heavier things do indeed fall faster. Here is the first classic example. This is a bowling ball and a basketball dropped from the same height.

Normally, I hold these two balls up in a classroom and ask students which will hit the ground first. I never actually drop them because dropping a bowling ball on the ground from above your head might not be such a great idea. However, it does get the students excited that I might actually drop them.

This year, the students convinced me to actually drop them. We went outside so I could drop them in the grass. Here are two videos that students recorded. There is a bonus experiment afterwards which I will describe bellow. View Iframe URL. These two objects clearly have different mass but they fall with the same acceleration. I guess I should point out one more thing about falling objects. If you were to measure the position of these balls as they fall, they do not fall with a constant speed.

Instead, they fall with a constant acceleration. That is to say that as they fall, the speed increases. For these two objects, they hit the ground at the same time because they both start from rest and both have the same acceleration. Here is another example that you can try yourself. Take two sheets of plain paper.