Why is mass measured in Kg? If I go out into space and go to balance a substance with 2Kg it will come out 0?

Question

so when they say there mass is always the same... how can that be because if i go to find the mass of gold out in space it would be impossible becuase it would require gravity

Answer 1

Mass is the same but the weight isnt the same. Weight is based on mass times gravity.

Answer 2

Weight and mass are different things.

Back toward the end of the 18th century, like in the 1760s, people began to realise that the systems of weights and measures were too complicated. Not only did they vary from country to country, they varied within a country, some measurements that went by the same name were different in different towns in the same country.

When the distance around the Earth was measured, it was decided by some people to divide it up to give a handy measure called the metre. This turned out to be a bit longer than the English yard, which is good for measuring short distances. like the width of a street or the length of a house. If you took a cubic metre of pure water, the weight was just a bit over an English ton. If you divided the metre by 10, that gave you a decimetre, and a cubic decimetre of pure water weighed a bit more than two English pounds. If you divided this weight by a thousand, you got a measure of weight they called a gram, because it was close to an old measure of weight with a similar name.

So a thousand of these grams was called a "kilogram" where "kilo-" means a thousand. So you can see that grams, kilograms and metres were all ultimately related to a measure of the Earth. All this was mostly worked out by French natural philosophers, but it was not used until the French Revolution.

There is no gravity in free-fall space, so a measurement of the weight of any object has no meaning because the object has no weight. The object is still there and still has mass. But there is no force acting on it, therefore no weight. Weight and mass are different things. You could measure the mass by applying a known force to it and measuring the acceleration.

On Earth, the force applied to the mass by Earths gravity is everywhere about the same. All balance and weighing instruments are calibrated to ignore this force and they read out in terms of mass. On another planet, where gravity might be two thirds that of Earth, the mass of an object would be the same, but an Earth spring or electronic scale would read two thirds of the actual mass. But a balance is set up so that it has equal masses on either side of a pivot and it would give the correct reading.

All that was thoroughly worked out by Sir Isaac Newton hundreds of years ago and is not news.

Force = mass times acceleration or f=ma

Answer 3

Mass is a measurement of how much material there actually is in an object. It is not "how big" the object is - that is called volume.

To measure the weight of something requires gravity. But you can measure the mass of something in other ways.

For example, if you apply a specific amount of force on an object, and then see how fast it moves afterward, then you can calculate what the mass is, because the amount of force you used divided by the acceleration it caused will equal the mass of the object. The formula is: m = f / a.

You could also measure the amount of gravity this object exerts on other objects, since all masses exert gravity on all other masses. However this amount will be really tiny if you are talking about a 2kg weight, and will be very hard to measure.

Answer 4

mass is the amount of matter in a substance; weight is the force exerted by a mass at an acceleration. Think about a less exotic situation than space to understand the difference than mass and weight. Sitting in a roller coaster waiting for the start of the ride, you have a your weight is what you normally think it is. When the ride is active and you're going through a hard turn, your body is forced to one side: that's the increase in weight due to the different acceleration. [Your mass is unchanged. When you get off the ride no more of you exists than before.] Also consider the "light" feeling you get as you pass over the top of a climb on the coaster. Your weight decreases because of the change in acceleration. [Your mass may decrease if you toss your cookies at the end.]

Answer 5

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Would you not find that your question is better suited to the subject of cosmology? It is an interesting inquiry but nonetheless leads us into a realm of the esoterical. What do you say? Here is why this might be said or rather, is what I ponder most. You denote that there is no gravitational pull on the objects; but -- where is there in space that exists no gravitational pulls, that is, if we consider that gravity is ubiquitous, if in varying degrees. Galaxies are influenced by the gravitational pulls of other galaxies, and clusters by the pulls of other clusters. Gravity is omnipresent. The entire universe is an ocean of gravity, and whatever you measure would risk being confounded by inconstancy of measure due to variant pulls of gravitational influences existing throughout the universe. You can take a balance into space, but you will have -- we hope -- already measured the mass of the balance at first here, on Earth, something already agreed to and is based on a fixed constant. For once in space, you do not have a sure-fire way to tare weight the readings of the balance itself that you can in turn measure the mass of whatever is the object being measured. And so this takes us to imagination, I can suppose conjecture and, except perhaps for those who are physical scientists, leaves us to resolve to educated supposition that we can finally answer your question. What do you think about that? Yours is an interesting question.

Answer 6

Mass is not always in kg's. If you balanced an object in space w/ a mass of 2 kg's or any amount of mass it would balance out to 0 because there is no gravity. But keep in mind Newton's 2'nd law, "Net force on an object is equal to its mass multiplied by its acceleration." Or, F=(MA)

And 3'rd, "For every force acting on an object, the object will exert an equal, yet opposite, force on its cause." Again F=(MA)

So, if in space you propelled a mass of gold, you should be able to determine the mass of the object by the amount of force needed to move it.

BTW- mass isn't the "space" an object takes up but it's molecular density. In other words, a cubic yard of styrofoam has less mass that a cubic yard of gold. Even though the gold takes up less space.

Obviously, the styrofoam would take much less force to move in a direction and stop.

Answer 7

Mass is measured in kg not Kg, SI is case sensitive so you need to use the correct case or you may end up changing the meaning of what you're saying (e.g. mm and Mm mean two completely different things).

But mass is invariant so if you mass 300 kg on Earth you'd mass 300 kg on Mars and the Moon and Jupiter and the neutron star on the other side of the galaxy but you would weigh something different on each object.

Scales on Earth measure the apparent weight (which is different from the weight) and then use the value of the acceleration of gravity on Earth to calculate what your mass is but if you're in space you have to measure mass by other means.

Answer 8

Is Mass Measured In Kilograms

Answer 9

Mass is constant no matter which part of the universe you are in. What changes is weight due to the different gravitational fields of the universe. Mass is the amount of matter in a subsance while weight is the gravitational pull on matter which has mass. Weight is therefore considered as a downward force of gravity on mass.

Answer 10

Mass can be measured in a weightless environment.

And Newton didn't say that force = mass X acceleration. He said force is proportional to the change of motion (momentum). Speed or direction or mass, or any such combination, can be changing.