Mass and Gravity

Everything has mass!
Even air?
Yes!
Even space?
Yes!
Even a dust speck?
Yes!

Mass is a measure of how much matter is in an object.  All matter has mass, so it has gravity...

You have gravity and your pencil has gravity.  Gravity is the attraction of one particle or object to another.

Imagine you are holding a pencil, your favorite pencil, the one with the white eraser on the end.  You, the larger mass have the greatest gravitational pull, your pencil has an itty-bitty gravitational pull on you.  Yes, you exert the greater force over your pencil.  You can control your pencil with any flick of your fingers or wrist, you can make it make loopy loops, and dot your i's.  And you thought you didn't have any super powers!

Well, not those kind of super powers...
The greater the mass of an object, the greater the gravitational pull (attraction) is on other objects.  Imagine you are the Sun...

The Sun is the most massive object in our Solar System.  The Sun controls all the planets, asteroids and comets that are within our Solar System!  The Sun has the largest gravitational pull.  This  is why the Earth doesn't fly away out into space, it is controlled by the Sun's gravitational pull.  Even though we are millions of miles away from the Sun (93,000,000 miles) the force of the Sun's gravity keeps pulling us back toward the Sun.

The Sun is the Boss of the Solar System, controlling every object within it's gravitational pull.  As you can see, Earth goes around the Sun every 365.25 days a year and never falls into the Sun.  Why?  I know why...and I'm going to save it for another day....