• Question: What gives something its mass? and explain in detail

    Asked by thisura to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 2 Jul 2012.
    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      HI thisura,
      At its simplest, an object’s mass describes how it responds to a gravity field, and how much of a gravity field it itself will produce. For example, the earth has a huge mass, so it will create a strong gravity field, so every other object on earth is attracted to it, which is what we call gravity. If an object had no mass, it would not be affected by the force of gravity.

      We still don’t really know exactly what it is that creates this force though! The Higgs boson is one of the suggestions that has been put forward – every particle with mass is interacting with Higgs bosons, which is why they respond to gravitational forces. However, until the Higgs is discovered at the Large hadron collider at CERN, we cannot know for sure that this is the case.

    • Photo: Nuala Carson

      Nuala Carson answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      hey thisura,

      James has given a great answer so i cant really add anything to this. Mass is a really interesting concept because although you physically stay the same weight when you go into space the effect of gravity reduces and you almost become weightless. I thinks its pretty cool

    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      Hi thisura,

      When you combine an objects mass with the gravity of another object you get it’s weight, so human weight is a product of our mass and the gravity of the Earth. When an astronaut is on the moon they weight only 1/6th of what they do on Earth because Lunar gravity is only 1/6th of that on Earth, so a pretty quick way to lose weight, but not mass!

Comments