The Range of Gravity and How It Is An Illusion

 by Jack H

Objects with mass warp the fabric of spacetime and create a gravitational field that attracts

other nearby objects. But how big is this field and how far out into space does it reach? We

understand that gravitational attraction gets weaker as your distance from the object

increases, but how far away would you have to go from an object to be completely out of its

gravitational reach? For example, it is easy to think that once you have left earth’s

atmosphere you become weightless and therefore you are no longer under the influence of

earth’s gravity. However, it is earth’s gravity that allows you to remain in orbit around our

planet, much like the International Space Station or the moon do. For a larger scale example

we can observe our solar system, the furthest thing that orbits our sun is ironically named

‘Farfarout’ and it orbits 132 times further out than we do. So this poses the question: how far

can a gravitational field reach? The unfortunately mind bending answer is that it reaches on

forever, an object on the other side of our universe will be influenced by our earth’s

gravitational field and we too will be influenced by its gravitational field. It will be an

incomprehensibly negligible force; however, it is still there. Therefore, there is no distance

you can travel to escape the gravitational pull of an object. On our planet, when you jump

there is an incredibly small astronomical distance between you and the earth beneath you

but because both you and the earth have mass, you are attracted to each other. This means

that you pull the earth towards you with an exponentially diminutive force, and this is over an

immensely short distance so imagine how negligible a gravitational force like this would be

over a large stretch of the universe.

Gravity is not what you think. The reason you are pulled towards large objects is the effect of

spacetime being warped. When you fall towards the earth, you aren’t moving, the earth is

rising to meet you. This would mean that the earth would have to expand outwards in all

directions to reach all falling objects at the same rate, and this would be a true statement.

However, the more massive an object in space, the more it warps spacetime. So as the

earth expands towards the falling objects, its size and mass increase and therefore the

space time it is situated in becomes more and more warped. These two phenomena (the

expansion of the earth and the shrinking of space time) are perfectly balanced, giving the

illusion that the earth remains the same size and yet there is still a constant force that pulls

everything towards it. This is what gravity truly is.