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Astrology, that unlikely and vague pseudoscience, makes much of the position of the planets at the moment of one’s birth. The only known force a planet exerts on Earth is gravitational.

(a) Calculate the gravitational force exerted on a 4.20 kg baby by a 100 kg father 0.200 m away at birth (he is assisting, so he is close to the child).

(b) Calculate the force on the baby due to Jupiter if it is at its closest distance to Earth, some 6.29e+11 m away. How does the force of Jupiter on the baby compare to the force of the father on the baby?

Father’s gravitational force on the baby is:

Jupiter’s gravitational force on the baby is:

(c) What should be the father’s weight, so that he exerts the same force on the baby as that of Jupiter? **
**this section is not included in the Reference material

Discussion

Other objects in the room and the hospital building also exert similar gravitational forces. (Of course, there could be an unknown force acting, but scientists first need to be convinced that there is even an effect, much less that an unknown force causes it.)

Reference : OpenStax College,College Physics. OpenStax College. 21 June 2012.
http://openstaxcollege.org/textbooks/college-physics
Creative Commons License : http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Dedicated to little Konstantinos

In a video game design, a map shows the location of other characters relative to the player, who is situated at the origin, and the direction they are facing. A character currently shows on the map at coordinates (-3, 5). If the player rotates counterclockwise by 20 degrees, then the objects in the map will correspondingly rotate 20 degrees clockwise. Find the new coordinates of the character.

To rotate the position of the character, we can imagine it as a point on a circle, and we will change the angle of the point by 20 degrees. To do so, we first need to find the radius of this circle and the original angle.

Drawing a right triangle inside the circle, we can find the radius using the Pythagorean Theorem:

To find the angle, we need to decide first if we are going to find the acute angle of the triangle, the reference angle, or if we are going to find the angle measured in standard position. While either approach will work, in this case we will do the latter. By applying the cosine function and using our given information we get

While there are two angles that have this cosine value, the angle of 120.964 degrees is in the second quadrant as desired, so it is the angle we were looking for.

Rotating the point clockwise by 20 degrees, the angle of the point will decrease to 100.964 degrees. We can then evaluate the coordinates of the rotated point

For x axis:

For y axis:

The coordinates of the character on the rotated map will be (-1.109, 5.725)

Reference : PreCalculus: An Investigation of Functions,Edition 1.4 © 2014 David Lippman and Melonie Rasmussen
http://www.opentextbookstore.com/precalc/
Creative Commons License : http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/