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Science question concerning physics of small moons
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Q: could you land a space vehicle on a "moon" of a diameter < 1km? if you could, could you walk on it while experiencing gravity (aka not float into the atmoshpere)? if so, could you hit a golf ball and have it hit you in the back? or, if light is subjected to gravity, could you see your back by pointing a telescope to the horizon? believe it or not i couldnt find this info on wikipedia.
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not 100%, but im pretty sure its not possible, it would have to be insanly dense for it to have a strong enough gravitational field to stop you floating.
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There must be some formula to calculate this, but if you have a different substance, would you have a different gravity?
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that's no moon... that's a space station.
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Light and time will bend around extremely massive bodies like stars, but certainly not anything at the scale you're talking about. And this is still only to a slight degree--look at pictures of huge stars and you can actually see others that are behind them, but the vision path is never going to arc around the object like you're suggesting.
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Yeah, realistically, no 1km diameter object will be able to bend light in a curve around it. It would take a superdense object like a neutron start to even begin to have that kind of effect, and anyways, you and your telescope would be crushed by such gravity. As for the golf ball, its possible if you do the right angle and speed. As for walking, maybe... I mean the moons diameter is something like 3500 km, and the gravity is like 1/16th that of Earth... it wouldnt take much to set you off from the object.
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