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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
gravitational
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
attraction
▪ Their gravitational attraction would thus curve up the universe to infinitely small size.
▪ This hypothesis holds that giant tongues of material were torn from the preexisting Sun by the gravitational attraction ofa passing star.
▪ Stars are initially formed from gas, mostly hydrogen, and contract under their own gravitational attraction.
▪ By collision and gravitational attraction, the larger planetesimals swept up the smaller pieces and became the planets.
▪ Earlier experiments had compared the Earth's gravitational attraction with the centrifugal force from its own rotation.
▪ Both Earth and Moon have gravitational fields that allow bodies that would have missed them without their gravitational attraction to hit them.
▪ The hard core of Newtonian physics is comprised of Newton's laws of motion plus his law of gravitational attraction.
▪ Stars will remain stable like this for a long time, with heat from the nuclear reactions balancing the gravitational attraction.
collapse
▪ Then war intervened, Oppenheimer became involved in the atom bomb project, and he lost interest in gravitational collapse.
▪ It showed that gravitational collapse was not as much of a dead end as it had appeared to be.
▪ In 1965 I read about Penrose's theorem that any body undergoing gravitational collapse must eventually form a singularity.
▪ Let me go back to my earlier discussion of gravitational collapse.
▪ However, Chandrasekhar showed that for a sufficiently massive star the gravitational collapse continues until the star shrinks to a point.
▪ The no-hair theorem implies that a large amount of information is lost in a gravitational collapse.
▪ It modifies the scenario of gravitational collapse in the following way.
energy
▪ The more asymmetric the collapse, the larger the gravitational energy release becomes.
▪ For gravitational energy is negative, while rest mass and kinetic energy are positive.
▪ The answer is that it was borrowed from the gravitational energy of the universe.
▪ The universe has an enormous debt of negative gravitational energy, which exactly balances the positive energy of the matter.
▪ During the inflationary period the universe borrowed heavily from its gravitational energy to finance the creation of more matter.
▪ The debt of gravitational energy will not have to be paid until the end of the universe.
field
▪ As the star shrank, the gravitational field at the surface would become stronger and the escape velocity would increase.
▪ Thus, in particular, heavenly bodies moving in a gravitational field are well described by such geodesics.
▪ The rate of thermal escape depends on the temperature of the exosphere and on the gravitational field.
▪ Let us return to our sphere of particles dropping in a gravitational field.
▪ Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy.
▪ Both Earth and Moon have gravitational fields that allow bodies that would have missed them without their gravitational attraction to hit them.
▪ To escape from the Moon's gravitational field, a sample must be accelerated to a velocity above 2.4 kilometres per second.
▪ All that is left is a strong, but invisible, gravitational field.
force
▪ Weight is the gravitational force of attraction exerted on a body.
▪ The split rock is slow to fall, the gravitational force being lower and the angle of fall correspondingly sharper.
▪ However, the larger the body the less important become its non-gravitational forces in comparison with its internal gravitational forces.
▪ This is because the gravitational forces are appreciable over much larger distances than the non-gravitational forces.
▪ He would be torn apart by the difference between the gravitational force on his head and his feet.
▪ But even with a rigid outer Moon gravitational forces would have raised the floor most of the way towards isostatic equilibrium.
▪ So for a sufficiently large number of matter particles, gravitational forces can dominate over all other forces.
▪ If there is less than a certain amount, the gravitational force will be insufficient to stop a never-ending expansion.
forces
▪ However, the larger the body the less important become its non-gravitational forces in comparison with its internal gravitational forces.
▪ This is because the gravitational forces are appreciable over much larger distances than the non-gravitational forces.
▪ Einstein next considered the implications of the equivalence principle for motion in free fall, that is to say motion under gravitational forces alone.
▪ But even with a rigid outer Moon gravitational forces would have raised the floor most of the way towards isostatic equilibrium.
▪ The gravitational forces are the manifestation of space-time curvature due to the presence of matter.
▪ So for a sufficiently large number of matter particles, gravitational forces can dominate over all other forces.
▪ They don't have the energy to hold themselves up any longer-against their own gravitational forces.
potential
▪ The metric components can also be rewritten in terms of the gravitational potential so that.
pull
▪ As they were collapsing, the gravitational pull of matter outside these regions might start them rotating slightly.
▪ After a while we are aware of a deviation, the gravitational pull of an unseen planet.
▪ Spring Tides - Moon and Sun in opposition, with combined gravitational pull. 4.
▪ As if this were an apex of this island, its source of gravitational pull.
▪ The complete system involved includes a flat surface - a table, perhaps - and a steady downward gravitational pull.
▪ Such a situation creates a gravitational pull toward contractual arrangements and a corresponding push away from employment in the traditional sense.
▪ What, even so, of the required gravitational pull?
▪ These counteract the tendency for the body to contract under its own gravitational pull.
wave
▪ In the alternative case of thick gravitational waves, they are non-scalar curvature singularities.
▪ It must be concluded that the above solution can not be interpreted in terms of an interaction between plane gravitational waves.
▪ Modern detectors which should be capable of detecting the gravitational waves from a supernova collapse in our Galaxy are described.
▪ It does not therefore describe the collision of genuinely non-aligned gravitational waves.
▪ It thus excludes situations involving impulsive gravitational waves.
▪ During the passage of gravitational waves it is the structure of space-time itself which oscillates.
▪ It is in fact a general feature of colliding electromagnetic plane waves that gravitational waves are always generated by the collision.
▪ A gravitational wave at the natural frequency for longitudinal oscillations of the bar would set it ringing like a tuning fork.
PHRASES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
magnetic/gravitational/force field
▪ All that is left is a strong, but invisible, gravitational field.
▪ All this occurs in magnetic fields very much above the maximum tolerated by the superconducting state.
▪ As the star shrank, the gravitational field at the surface would become stronger and the escape velocity would increase.
▪ At the upper critical field the magnetic field completely penetrated the sample and it reverted entirely to its normal state.
▪ In a few rare cases, lava flows on land have taken place just as the magnetic field was undergoing a reversal.
▪ It does raise the question of how pigeons detect the magnetic field.
▪ The flow of a magnetic field is taken from magnetic north pole to magnetic south pole.
▪ The radio waves, magnetic field and computer technology combine to produce vivid images of the body's soft tissue.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ the Earth's gravitational pull
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A revealing difference between gravitational and electromagnetic radiation is that dipole radiation is absent in the gravitational case.
▪ However, it is not moving fast enough to totally escape the pull of the Earth's gravitational field.
▪ In practice instruments could not survive such a journey; they would be torn apart by the increasing gravitational field gradients.
▪ It modifies the scenario of gravitational collapse in the following way.
▪ Modern detectors which should be capable of detecting the gravitational waves from a supernova collapse in our Galaxy are described.
▪ The gravitational field generated in its productive phase by the legislative cycle attracted items from several diverse sources.
▪ The second main source of internal energy is heat from gravitational separation.
▪ They regard such wobbles as responses to the gravitational tugs of planets orbiting around them.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Gravitational

Gravitational \Grav`i*tation*al\, a. (Physics) Of or pertaining to the force of gravity; as, gravitational units.

Wiktionary
gravitational

a. Pertaining to, or caused by, gravity or gravitation.

WordNet
gravitational

adj. of or relating to or caused by gravitation [syn: gravitative]

Wikipedia

Usage examples of "gravitational".

If IRU 247 was watching now, he would explain the gravitational anomalies later.

Reason for high concentration of gravitational anomalies in and around center of winter storm system.

Both gravitational anomalies originating within possible walking distance of last known position of civilian subject originated to east of last known position and proceeded southwest at high altitude.

The cerebrospinal fluid supplies a buoyancy that almost entirely neutralizes gravitational pull within the skull.

They would take the temperature of dust clouds and nebulas, track down gravitational anomalies, and provide pictures of the controlled chaos around the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

I knew, a bottle of fingernail polish Gina had left on the dressing table went flying, and, defying all gravitational law, landed upside down in the suitcase she had placed on the floor at the end of the daybed, around seven or eight feet away.

The gravitational energy released in the collapse would heat the core further, eventually reaching the billion degrees necessary to initiate the fusion of helium nuclei into carbon, with other elements appearing through neutron capture along the lines Gamow had proposed.

Your gravitometer is showing oscillations we think might be gravitational waves.

Oort cloud with a gravitational footprint of less than a kilogramme more or less indefinitely.

Bandar offered the opinion that the landship might have encountered a transient gravitational cyst, causing the man to unbalance and tumble over the rail.

Only, to find the phenomena from which to read the absolute characteristics of the two sides of the magnetic polarity, we must not turn to the body of man but to that of the earth, one of whose characteristics it is to be as much the bearer of a magnetic field as of gravitational and levitational fields.

A pod of K-ships coms shrieking with fake traffic, decoys flaring off in several dimensions flipped themselves down the Redline gravitational alley along a trajectory designed for maximum unpredictability.

Fisher realize he was looking at a binary star system locked in a gravitational dance.

Tiny actinic spangles of light showed where these had begun to encounter the minefields she had sown into the gravitational subcurrents of the cluster days before the freighters arrived.

The gravitational field of the superdense matter that makes up a black hole is strong enough to trap light itself.