If you drop an object, it will fall. It's a motion that we’ve all seen hundreds of times. We’ve also all seen plenty of the moon, which makes one complete orbit around our planet every 27.3 ...

It looks like a parabola. Well, it is. ... This means that it falls and accelerates downward with an acceleration of -9.8 m/s 2 just like all free-falling objects.

The speed also tops off because of drag. This is what happened in probably the most famous instance of an object moving faster than sound by way of gravity: Felix Baumgartner’s jump in 2012 from ...