Any mass warps the fabric of space-time around itself. The more the mass, the more the warping. The force that an object feels when travelling along this warped path is called gravity. It tends to move the object towards the mass.
The strength of this force depends on the gravitational constant. Denoted by a ‘G’, it is a fundamental physical constant. It was first accurately determined by Henry Cavendish in 1797. G is an essential component of both Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation and Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
In Newton’s theory, the gravitational force between two objects is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. G is the proportionality constant.
