Which would fall first in vacuum: A feather or a ball?

If you take a feather and a ball, and drop them simultaneously from your hand or from the top of a building what would you observe? Obviously the ball drops faster than the feather. But why?

Air resistance is the result of air molecules bombarding onto the object as it moves through the layer of air. The feather offers more air resistance and hence it falls slower.

Now you can up the ante and ask what if you remove the air resistance?

If you remove all the air molecules from the air,you would just get vacuum, a space devoid of any matter. With no molecules to bombard the object,

The feather and the ball would fall at the same rate as you can see in the animation. The demonstration was carried in the world’s biggest vacuum chamber.

( Extra: The same demonstration, but this time done on the moon :

image

Source video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E43-CfukEgs

Have a good day!

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s