Two students want to determine if the acceleration of an object in free fall depends on the mass of the object. They conduct the following experiment to investigate this question: They drop a balled up sheet of paper (0.005 kg), a notebook (0.4 kg), and their physics book (5 kg) from a height of one meter. If air resistance is ignored, which of the following best predicts which object will experience the greatest acceleration?

All the objects experience the same acceleration

Explanation:

According to Newton's law of universal gravitation, we have the gravitational force F given by the relation;

Where;

G = The universal gravitational constant

M₁ = The mass of the Earth

m₂ = The mass of the object in the Earths gravitational field

R = The radius of the Earth

Therefore, we have;

Which gives;

Therefore, based on the above calculation, all three object will have the same acceleration due to gravity, g, when air resistance is ignored.