Gravity From Sun, Moon, Person
Most recent answer: 02/07/2017
- Padraic Mills (age 23)
Edmonton Alberta Canada
The pull from the Sun and Moon is simple enough to calculate because you can look up their masses and their distances and use that the gravitational field falls off as 1/distance2. I'll do a rough calculation without looking anything up.
You know the moon tides are bigger than sun tides, but not a huge amount bigger. I'll guess roughly x3. The distance to the sun, if I remember right, is around 300x the distance to the moon. That means that the tidal effects from the moon, compared to the moon gravity here, are enhanced by a factor of around 300 compared to the same comparison for the sun. So I think the sun's field here is about 100 times as big as the moon's. You can check that by looking up the precise numbers.
How big is the sun's field? Just using the approximate distance to the sun and the radius of the earth's orbit, I get something around 10-3 m/s2. So for the moon it would be roughly 10-5m/s2. The earth's surface field, for comparison, is close to 10 m/s2.
If I assume that you and your friend have typical sizes of around 1m and density not all that different from the earth, I'd get that your pull on each other would only be around 10-7m/s2. That's a little rougher than the other calculations, even with accurate numbers, because you probably aren't spherical. Even with these rough numbers, however, it looks like the person-to-person gravity pull is less than the gravity pull from the moon.
Mike W.
(published on 02/07/2017)