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Our 3rd grade student was fascinated by a NASA poster showing spaghettification of a rocket ship. He wants to show how this happens. He wants to use a magnet and a slinky to show how this happens. I wanted to eliminate the magnet as I didn’t want him to confuse gravitational force from magnetic force. So he thought a vacuum’s sucking power might show the same thing. Is he on the right track?



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Ellen11715,

Thank you for the question. Sorry for the late reply. If this is still relevant, here's some advice.

Gravity is one of those forces (Fg) that is hard to approximate with others. It is is one of the weaker forces causing two bodies with mass to accelerate toward one another, but persistent across much longer distances. Fg drops off rapidly as two objects moves further away from each other.

You can show this attraction between two objects as a function of distance by hanging a small object (like a paper clip) next to a massive object (like a steel ball) and measuring the deflection away from hanging straight down. Then moving the paper clip further away and showing that the closer the two objects are, the stronger the pull of gravity.