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How does increasing an object’s mass change its gravitational pull?
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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.
According to Newton’s law of gravitation, the gravitational force between two objects is directly proportional to the product of their masses. This means that increasing the mass of either object results in a stronger gravitational pull between them.12
Mathematically, this relationship is expressed as:
In this equation, represents the magnitude of the attractive force, and are the masses of the two objects, is the distance between them, and is the gravitational constant. Because the force is proportional to the product of the masses, if you increase the mass of one object, the gravitational force it exerts—and experiences—increases by the same factor.12