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# Free Fall The Earth attracts all bodies. The attractive force of the Earth is called the force of gravity. Any object with mass cannot escape this force, and it is pulled to Earth. This is unavoidable. If an object is thrown upwards, it will eventually fall back down. The same applies to objects...

# Free Fall The Earth attracts all bodies. The attractive force of the Earth is called the force of gravity. Any object with mass cannot escape this force, and it is pulled to Earth. This is unavoidable. If an object is thrown upwards, it will eventually fall back down. The same applies to objects thrown from a certain height because Earth attracts them. The motion under the action of gravitational force is called free fall. Free fall only occurs in a vacuum (absence of air). If an object falls through a medium with air, then air resistance is added to gravity. Under these conditions, free fall only occurs in the absence of air. In the absence of air, all objects fall with a constant acceleration towards the Earth. This acceleration is defined as gravitational acceleration, $g = 9.81$. Freefall is a special case of motion with constant acceleration, because the acceleration due to gravity is always constant and downwards. There is a misconception about free fall. People think that if two bodies of the same mass are thrown from the same height, they will hit the ground at the same time. However, this only happens in the absence of air. In the presence of air, the only constant quantity for both objects is the acceleration of free fall, $g = 9.81$. To simplify mathematical operations, this constant can be approximated to 10. **(Image Description):** The image shows two orange/brownish objects falling downwards. The objects are shown falling straight toward a horizontal green line that represents the ground.