13.1: Prelude to Gravitation
In this chapter, we study the nature of the gravitational force for objects as small as ourselves and for systems as massive as entire galaxies. We show how the gravitational force affects objects on Earth and the motion of the Universe itself. Gravity is the first force to be postulated as an action-at-a-distance force, that is, objects exert a gravitational force on one another without physical contact and that force falls to zero only at an infinite distance. Earth exerts a gravitational force on you, but so do our Sun, the Milky Way galaxy, and the billions of galaxies, like those shown above, which are so distant that we cannot see them with the naked eye.