What is free fall in stellar terms?

Answer 1

Technically free fall is motion under gravity.

When something is falling freely, it means that there are no outside forces affecting it. In Newtonian mechanics, the "force of gravity" is the only force at work, but general relativity says that gravity is not a force at all because a body is moving along a geodesic in curved spacetime.

Since gravity alone determines how a star or planet moves, all stars and planets are therefore in free fall.

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Answer 2

Declan Carroll

In terms of stars, free fall is the process by which gas and dust in a stellar nursery collapse gravitationally and form a protostar.

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Answer from HIX Tutor

When evaluating a one-sided limit, you need to be careful when a quantity is approaching zero since its sign is different depending on which way it is approaching zero from. Let us look at some examples.