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How does gravity affect objects near Earth’s surface?

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gravitational lens — gravity A galactic cluster, about five billion light-years away, produces a tremendous gravitational field that “bends” light around it. This lens produces multiple copies of a blue galaxy about twice as distant. Four images are visible in a circle surrounding the lens; a fifth is visible near the center of the picture, which was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Near Earth’s surface, gravity acts as a universal force of attraction that exerts a downward pull on all objects, which we perceive as weight. This force is proportional to an object's mass, though mass itself remains constant regardless of location.123

When an object is in free fall near the surface, it experiences uniform acceleration due to gravity, commonly denoted as g. In the absence of air resistance, all objects fall with this same constant acceleration, which is approximately 9.8 meters (32 feet) per second squared. This means that for every second an object is in free fall, its speed increases by about 9.8 meters per second.14

Additionally, objects positioned at a height above the surface possess gravitational potential energy. As an object falls, this potential energy is converted into kinetic energy, demonstrating the conservation of energy within the Earth-body system.4