Rolnick section 4.1 (review)
Carroll and Ostlie, Modern Astrophysics section 16.1, attached.
- If the inertial mass
were not the same as the gravitational mass
, what would be the period 
of a simple pendulum of length 
at a distance 
from the center of a spherical mass 
?
- Consider a horizontally travelling photon on the surface of a 1.4
solar mass neutron star, with radius 10 km.
- What is the gravitational acceleration
on the surface of the neutron star?
- Neglecting time dilation effects between the freefalling observer
and observer 
on the neutron star surface, through what angle does see a light ray bend over a path of horizontal length ? What angle does this give for 
m? 
m?
- At what speed does travel relative to when the photon reaches horizontal length , if initially at rest with respect to ?
- From (b) and (c), what can you say about the relevance of general and special relativistic effects for a neutron star?
- What is the gravitational acceleration
- A satellite moves in a circular orbit about the earth. Inside the
satellite, two objects are simultaneously released from rest relative
to the satellite, one object being
above the other. After
one revolution, the objects will no longer lie on the same
vertical. What is their relative horizontal displacement; that is, by
what horizontal distance does the higher object lag, when the lower one
completes its first orbit? (This indicates a ``tidal'' effect even for
particles in circular orbit, and indicates that even in this special
case a finite laboratory frame cannot be a local inertial frame.)