Activities to address the Newtonian gravitational force in physics undergraduate courses
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55767/2451.6007.v30.n1.20320Keywords:
Gravitational force, Activities, Misconceptions, Higher education, Action and reactionAbstract
We start from the identification of a misconception among physics students: that in binary systems with greater total mass the intensity of the gravitational force is necessarily greater. In search of ways to confront it, in this text we suggest activities structured from analyses on the effect of the mass distribution on the intensity of the gravitational force. The activities were planned to last three or four class hours. In the first one, we propose that students compare the intensities of the gravitational forces acting on the Earth-Moon and Uranus-Miranda systems. After the students explain their considerations on the problem, we suggest that the teacher present: i) analyzes that show that the gravitational force in a binary system is maximum when the distribution of the total mass occurs homogeneously between the bodies; and ii) a possible explanation for this result based on Newton's 3rd Law of Motion. Exploratory applications of these activities gave us indications of their plausibility, evidencing that the students' knowledge about gravitational force is usually assimilated in a mnemonic way, without reflections on the fact that the calculation of the intensity of this force involves the product and not the sum of the masses.References
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