What Makes Gravity....Where Does It Come From?

Question

How is gravity generated

Answer 1

Because matter distorts spacetime.

Standard analogy is a rubber sheet - when an object is placed on it you see an indentation.

All matter has gravity - not just planets and stars - you have your own gravity and pull things towards you. The effect is negligible but its there.

Answer 2

That is the next big question!

Up until very recently gravity has been treated as an explanatory principle. It takes a form like a tautology or a circular definition.

What is gravity?
It is what makes things fall.
Why do things fall?
Gravity.

The search for an explanation for gravity one of the driving questions of Unified Field theory, String theory, M-Theory and all the other theories of everything being proposed.
Attempts to make it out as a space time distortion caused by mass in relativity has problems, In M-Theory it requires at least one other complete universe to be postulated (with laws of physics unlike ours) and there seems to be no way to explain it in terms of particle physics.

Darn good question! If you ever figure out the answer, publish! It will make you the next Newton or Einstein.

Answer 3

No-one knows.

It is certainly not just a property of mass. Its effect can be measured on energy and on massless particles. If this were not the case then perpetual motion would be possible.

General relativity does indeed describe gravity as a curvature of space-time. But whether this is the source of gravity is unclear, because GR is a classical and not a quantum theory, and most other forces are described as having a quantum source.

Answer 4

Gravity is a property of matter. If it has mass, it has gravity. No matter how small. A single proton is matter, and has gravity. A quark has gravity.

Of course, there are Neutrinos that apparently have mass but no gravity, so the above point is moot in their case. I'll refer you to a theoretical physicist.

There is a branch of the "string theory" that has gravity as a subatomic force that is tied to parallel universes, but that's also a little beyond my knowledge.

Answer 5

Gravity is more a rule of the universe than something which originates or generates somewhere. It's another name for the inverse square rule. Every object is attracted to another object (creates a ripple in the sheet of space-time), so some things seem to stay put with gravity and other things seem more flexible.

Answer 6

The force of gravity is an energy product. Hawking in his book "A Brief History of Time" on page 92, para 3, says "Like light, gravitational waves carry energy away from the objects that emit them.” The force of gravity is a particular form of energy and must have an energy source in order for it to operate. We find the answer as to why this occurs in the physics trilogy. This trilogy is: E = mc2, m = E/c2, and c2 = E/m. The last of these three is the equation for a gravitational field, or a field of physical time - the two are the same.

The energy of the E/m concept is that of the heat energy within a mass. This form of energy is divided by the mass containing it, which makes it a constant value. The mechanism that causes gravitons to generate is not the heat energy alone, it is what it does to the mass. You will note that the planets and our sun are all spherical in shape. It is the heat energy contained within these masses that form them into their shapes. But having this shape alone does not generate a gravitational field. Were our planet to suddenly lose all of its heat energy, and still retain its spherical shape, it would have no gravitational field.

Heat energy within a mass causes individual atoms to begin losing their shape of "zero rest." A mass in a gravitational field has mass change in shape as does a mass moving in outer space. You, for instance, if you are at sea level, you are accelerating at an average speed of 22 mph downward. Were you to be able to instantly transport yourself into outer space, it is that speed that you would be moving at.

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Answer 7

No one really knows how it is generated. We know it has to do with the mass of the objects and distance apart. But we really don't know anything beyond that. Other forces (strong nuclear, weak nuclear, and electromagnetic) are caused by the exchange of subatomic particles - gravity, as far as we can see, is not. In fact, there are theories out there that it isn't a force in itself at all but rather a product of acceleration.
Sorry I couldn't give you a real answer to your question....unfortunately, there isn't one.

Answer 8

Gravity is a force of attraction between two bodies having mass.
All bodies in the universe attract each other, and the force of attraction(ie. gravity) is directly proportional to the masses of the object and inversly proportional to the distance between them.
Gravity increases proportionally with the mass, and that is the reason why earth has more gravity than moon -- Or the reason for feeling lesser weight in moon

Answer 9

gravity comes from anything with mass

the sun creates gravity that keeps the planets orbiting it, the earth creates the gravity that keeps the moon orbiting it

Answer 10

Gravity is generated by all objects, space, and time. (I don't know)