If only we could actually attempt this experiment, right? It’d be fun, I believe. Dr. James O’Donoghue created an animation showing how fast an object can fall on different planets. The planetary scientist demonstrated what would happen if an object fell on the Sun, Earth, Ceres, Jupiter, the Moon, and Pluto:
The animation shows a ball dropping from 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) to the surface of each object, assuming no air resistance. You can compare, for example, that it takes 2.7 seconds for a ball to drop that distance on the Sun, while it takes 14.3 seconds Earth.
"This should give an idea for the pull you would feel on each object," O'Donoghue said.
But what about the pull of gravity on the big planets vs. Earth? Interestingly enough, it takes and 13.8 seconds for the ball to drop on Saturn, and 15 seconds on Uranus.
"It might be surprising to see large planets have a pull comparable to smaller ones at the surface," O'Donoghue explains on YouTube.
"For example Uranus pulls the ball down slower than at Earth! Why? Because the low average density of Uranus puts the surface far away from the majority of the mass. Similarly, Mars is nearly twice the mass of Mercury, but you can see the surface gravity is actually the same… this indicates that Mercury is much denser than Mars."
Ceres comes in at the pokiest place to play ball, with a ball dropping 1 km (0.6 miles) in 84.3 seconds.