What is my mass if I weigh 40 kg?

What is my mass if I weigh 40 kg?

Ever wonder what you might weigh on Mars or The Moon? Here's your chance to find out.

TO DO & NOTICE:

  • Fill in your weight below in the space indicated. You can enter your weight in any unit you wish.
  • Click on the "Calculate" button.
  • Notice that the weights on other worlds will automatically fill in. Notice that your weight is different on the different worlds.
  • You can click on the images of the planets to get more information about them from Bill Arnett's incredible Nine Planets web site.

WHAT'S GOING ON?

Mass and Weight

Before we get into the subject of gravity and how it acts, it's important to understand the difference between weight and mass.

We often use the terms "mass" and "weight" interchangeably in our daily speech, but to an astronomer or a physicist they are completely different things. The mass of a body is a measure of how much matter it contains. An object with mass has a quality called inertia. If you shake an object like a stone in your hand, you would notice that it takes a push to get it moving, and another push to stop it again. If the stone is at rest, it wants to remain at rest. Once you've got it moving, it wants to stay moving. This quality or "sluggishness" of matter is its inertia. Mass is a measure of how much inertia an object displays.

Weight is an entirely different thing. Every object in the universe with mass attracts every other object with mass. The amount of attraction depends on the size of the masses and how far apart they are. For everyday-sized objects, this gravitational pull is vanishingly small, but the pull between a very large object, like the Earth, and another object, like you, can be easily measured. How? All you have to do is stand on a scale! Scales measure the force of attraction between you and the Earth. This force of attraction between you and the Earth (or any other planet) is called your weight.

If you are in a spaceship far between the stars and you put a scale underneath you, the scale would read zero. Your weight is zero. You are weightless. There is an anvil floating next to you. It's also weightless. Are you or the anvil mass-less? Absolutely not. If you grabbed the anvil and tried to shake it, you would have to push it to get it going and pull it to get it to stop. It still has inertia, and hence mass, yet it has no weight. See the difference?

The Relationship Between Gravity and Mass and Distance

As stated above, your weight is a measure of the pull of gravity between you and the body you are standing on. This force of gravity depends on a few things. First, it depends on your mass and the mass of the planet you are standing on. If you double your mass, gravity pulls on you twice as hard. If the planet you are standing on is twice as massive, gravity also pulls on you twice as hard. On the other hand, the farther you are from the center of the planet, the weaker the pull between the planet and your body. The force gets weaker quite rapidly. If you double your distance from the planet, the force is one-fourth. If you triple your separation, the force drops to one-ninth. Ten times the distance, one-hundredth the force. See the pattern? The force drops off with the square of the distance. If we put this into an equation it would look like this:

What is my mass if I weigh 40 kg?

What is my mass if I weigh 40 kg?

The two "M's" on top are your mass and the planet's mass. The "r" below is the distance from the center of the planet. The masses are in the numerator because the force gets bigger if they get bigger. The distance is in the denominator because the force gets smaller when the distance gets bigger. Note that the force never becomes zero no matter how far you travel. Perhaps this was the inspiration for the poem by Francis Thompson:

All things
by immortal power
near or far
to each other
hiddenly linked are.
That thou cans't not stir a flower
without troubling a star.

What is my mass if I weigh 40 kg?

Isaac Newton

This equation, first derived by Sir Isaac Newton, tells us a lot. For instance, you may suspect that because Jupiter is 318 times as massive as the Earth, you should weigh 318 times what you weigh at home. This would be true if Jupiter was the same size as the Earth. But, Jupiter is 11 times the radius of the Earth, so you are 11 times further from the center. This reduces the pull by a factor of 112 resulting in about 2.53 times the pull of Earth on you. Standing on a neutron star makes you unimaginably weighty. Not only is the star very massive to start with (about the same as the Sun), but it is also incredibly small (about the size of San Francisco), so you are very close to the center and r is a very small number. Small numbers in the denominator of a fraction lead to very large results!

LINKS

  • Your Age On Other Worlds
  • Build A Solar System
  • The Exploratorium's "Observatory"
  • The Nine Planets
  • Views of the Solar System
  • NSSDC Solar System page
  • NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
  • Astronomy Picture of the Day

How do I calculate my mass?

Mass does not change with location. To find an object's mass using its weight, the formula is Mass equals Weight divided by the Acceleration of Gravity (M = W ÷ G). Convert the weight measured in pounds to the equivalent in Newtons.

How do you convert weight to mass?

The weight formula is the product of the object's mass and the gravitational force: W=m∗g W = m ∗ g . The standard unit for weight is Newtons (N), which is equal to kg⋅ms2 k g ⋅ m s 2 .

Is 40 kg weight or mass?

Note that in the metric system of units, a kilogram (kg) is a unit of mass, not weight. If an object has a mass of 40 kg on Earth it will have the same mass on the Moon. But, on a scale on Earth the 40 kg mass will weigh about 88 pounds.

What is my mass if I weigh 50 kg?

On earth your mass is 50kg and your weight (the force you exert on the ground) is 490 Newtons. On the moon your mass would still be 50kg but your weight would be 81 Newtons because gravity is lower.