From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The
surface gravity
,
g
, of an
astronomical
or other
object
is the
gravitational
acceleration
experienced
at its
surface
. The surface gravity may be thought of as the acceleration caused by the gravity experienced by a hypothetical test particle which is very close to the object's surface and which, in order not to disturb the system, has negligible mass.
Surface gravity is measured in units of
acceleration
, which, in the
SI
system, are meters per second squared. It may also be described as a multiple of the
Earth
's
gravity
,
g
= 9.80665 m/s
2
.
[1]
In
astrophysics
, the surface gravity may be expressed as log
g
, which is obtained by first expressing the gravity in
cgs units
, where the unit of acceleration is
centimeters
per second squared, and then taking the base 10
logarithm
.
[2]