I know planes can turn forward motion into upward force, but would a sphere take longer to hit the ground if it was launched straight forward at high speed than it would if it was dropped straight down.
Edit: what about frisbees or throw playing cards? are they actually falling slower because they’re moving fast or are they just maintaining maximum air resistance?
In: Physics
Horizontal and vertical motion are completely independent. Toss a ball vertically in a car and it lands back in your hand. Same idea.
Similarly, running and jumping off a cliff will land you the same distance out as if you did a regular run and jump at sea level.
I’m sure YouTube will confirm with some slow motion video.
Iirc, the time might be different but the terminal velocity (fastest an object will move) should be the same. So like if you drop a basketball from 100 feet up or launch the basketball up 100 feet, at their fastest they’ll both have the same speed. Its been a while since I did physics last though so I could be off with that explanation
No, unless its motion gives it *lift.* A plane gets lift by having wings. A sphere doesn’t.
In general, no.
In perfect circumstances, if you fire a cannon and drop a cannon ball from the same height at the same time, the canon balls should hit the ground at the same time. This assumes you are aiming the cannon parallel to the ground and the ground is perfectly flat.
However, there are some exceptions.
Because the earth is a sphere and gravity is determined by how far away we are from the earth, it is possible for your forward motion to take you further away from the planet at the exact same rate as gravity is pulling you to the planet. This is orbital velocity and it depends on your altitude. The international space station, because it is in low earth orbit, must orbit the planet every 92 minutes to keep from falling out of the sky. The moon, because it is much further away, only orbits the planet every 27 days and also never falls out of the sky.
Consider the extreme case: an object moving horizontally fast enough will enter orbit and thus never hit the ground. Such an object is constantly falling and is subject to constant acceleration, but the distance to the ground does not decrease at all. The other extreme is an object with no horizontal speed, which quickly falls to the ground. It makes sense that something between those extremes would experience something in between, falling, but taking longer to reach the ground. This happens because the planet is curved, and so the ground “falls away” from a fast moving object.
A bullet fired by a gun with barrel perfectly parallel to a flat ground surface ie 0 degree angle and a ball dropped from height, with both ball and gun at the same height, bullet exited barrel and ball dropped at the same moment ; both objects reach the ground at the same time.
Reason is that both are facing the identical vertical force that is gravity, which is irrespective of the mass of the body.
Here we assumed that there is no air thrust.
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