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Welcome to our Physics lesson on What is Gravitational Force? What is Gravitational Field?, this is the first lesson of our suite of physics lessons covering the topic of Types of Forces I. Gravitational Force and Weight, you can find links to the other lessons within this tutorial and access additional physics learning resources below this lesson.
In the previous Physics tutorial "What Causes the Motion? The Meaning of Force", we stated that there are two kind of forces considering the way how they act on objects: contact and field forces. The first category includes forces exerted by an object to another when there is a contact between them, while the later includes forces exerted when objects have a certain distance between them. Such forces are not exerted directly but by means of the respective field generated through them. For example, electric force is caused by the electric field generated by charged particles, magnetic force is caused by the magnetic field generated by magnets and so on.
Likewise, by definition, Gravitational Force is the attracting force between any two objects due to the interaction between their respective gravitational fields.
The phenomenon of objects' attraction due to the presence of the gravitational field (and therefore, of gravitational force) is known as "gravity". For example, Earth attracts all objects near its surface because these objects are inside the range of its gravitational field. Hence, we can say "Gravitational Field is the space around an object in which its gravitational attraction effect is observed." This means that Gravitational Force is a distant (field) force as mentioned above.
You have reached the end of Physics lesson 4.2.1 What is Gravitational Force? What is Gravitational Field?. There are 5 lessons in this physics tutorial covering Types of Forces I. Gravitational Force and Weight, you can access all the lessons from this tutorial below.
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