What happens to the gravitational potential energy of an object as it moves away from the Earth?
Practice Questions
1 question
Q1
What happens to the gravitational potential energy of an object as it moves away from the Earth?
It increases.
It decreases.
It remains constant.
It becomes zero.
As an object moves away from the Earth, its gravitational potential energy increases.
Questions & Step-by-step Solutions
1 item
Q
Q: What happens to the gravitational potential energy of an object as it moves away from the Earth?
Solution: As an object moves away from the Earth, its gravitational potential energy increases.
Steps: 6
Step 1: Understand what gravitational potential energy is. It is the energy an object has because of its position in a gravitational field, like near the Earth.
Step 2: Recognize that when an object is close to the Earth, it has a certain amount of gravitational potential energy.
Step 3: When the object moves away from the Earth, it is getting further from the source of gravity.
Step 4: As the object moves further away, the gravitational pull from the Earth decreases.
Step 5: Because the gravitational pull is weaker, the object gains more gravitational potential energy.
Step 6: Therefore, as the object continues to move away from the Earth, its gravitational potential energy keeps increasing.