I have a theoretical question that has been bugging me and my peers for weeks now – and we have yet to settle on a concrete answer.
Imagine two balloons, one is filled with air, one with concrete. They are both the same size (and hence have the same air resistance). On the moon, we are taught at school that they would drop at the same rate, however on earth, they obviously don't – with the concrete falling faster.
Our reasoning was as follows:
Air resistance is not a factor in this example, therefore the only other variable is the mass (density) of the two balloons.
If you were to change the medium from earth's atmospheric air to water, the air ballon floats as it is less dense than water (and therefore displaces more water than its mass), and consequently has an upwards buoyancy force acting on it. The concrete sinks for the same reasons.
Therefore in the medium of air, there is also, albeit somewhat reduced, bouyancy effect acting on the balloons – explaining why the concrete balloon falls faster.
Could someone please tell me if my logic is correct, and if not explaing to us what other forces are playing their part.
Thank you so much for clearing this up!
Best Answer
Suppose the balloon with air (A) weighs $m_a$ and the balloon with concrete (B) weights $m_b$. The force accelerating the balloons downwards is $m_a g$ for A and $m_b g$ for B, where $g$ is the acceleration due to gravity. In the absence of air the acceleration is simply this force divided by the mass, so both balloons accelerate at the same rate of $g$. So far so good.
Now suppose the air resistance is F. We don't need to worry exactly what F is. The force on balloon A is $m_a g - F$, so its acceleration is
$$ a_a = \frac{m_a g - F}{m_a} = g - \frac{F}{m_a} $$
and likewise the acceleration of balloon B is
$$ a_b = \frac{m_b g - F}{m_b} = g - \frac{F}{m_b} $$
So the balloons don't accelerate at the same rate. In fact the difference in the accelerations is simply
$$ \Delta a_{ba} = a_b - a_a = \frac{F}{m_a} - \frac{F}{m_b} $$
Since $m_b \gg m_a$ the difference is positive, i.e. balloon B accelerates at a much greater rate than balloon A.
Response to comment
I think there are a couple of possible sources of confusion. Let me attempt to clarify these, hopefully without making things even more confused!
Firstly the air resistance affects both the acceleration and the terminal velocity. I've only discussed acceleration because terminal velocity can get complicated.
Secondly, and I think this is the main source of confusion, the gravitational force on an object depends on its mass while the air resistance doesn't. However the air resistance depends on the velocity of the object while the gravitational force doesn't. That means the two forces change in different ways when you change the mass and speed of the object.
Incidentally, Briguy37 is quite correct that buoyancy has some effect, but to keep life simple let's assume the object is dense enough for buoyancy to be safely ignored.
Anyhow, for a mass $m$ the gravitational force is $F = mg$ so it's proportional to mass and it doesn't change with speed. Since $a = F/m$ the acceleration due to gravity is the same for all masses.
By contrast the air resistance is (to a good approximation) $F = Av^n$, where $A$ is a constant that depends on the object's size and shape and $n$ varies from 1 at low speeds to 2 at high speeds. In your example the size and shape of the ballons is the same so $F$ just depends on the speed and for any given speed will be the same for the two ballons. The deceleration due to air resistance will depend on the object mass: $a = Av^n/m$, so air resistance slows a heavy object less than it slows a light object.
When you first release the balloons their speed is zero so the air resistance is zero and they would start accelerating at the same rate. On the moon there is no air resistance, so the acceleration is independant of speed and the two objects hit the ground at the same speed.
On the Earth the acceleration is initially the same for both balloons, but as soon as they start moving the air resistance builds up. At a given velocity the force due to air resistance is the same for both ballons because it only depends on the shape and speed. However because acceleration is force divided by mass the deceleration of the two balloons is different. The deceleration of the heavy balloon is much less than the deceleration of the light balloon, and that's why it hits the floor first.
From the way you phrased your question I'm guessing that and answer based on calculus won't be that helpful, but for the record the way we calculate the trajectory of the falling balloons would be to write:
$$ \frac{dv}{dt} = g - \frac{Av^n}{m} $$
This equation turns out to be hard to solve, and we'd normlly solve it numerically. However you can see immediately that the mass of the object appears in the equation, so the change of velocity with time is affected by the mass.