what is angular momentum”
Angular momentum measures an object’s tendency to continue to spin. angular momentum = mass x velocity x distance (from point object is spinning or orbiting around) To describe how things move we often use the basic quantities of length, mass, and time. Quantities such as velocity, acceleration, force and energy are very powerful ones that help us understand how an object’s position will change over time and how it will interact with other things in the universe. Momentum and its cousin angular momentum are other very powerful quantities. Ordinary (or linear) momentum is a measure of an object’s tendency to move at constant speed along a straight path. Momentum depends on speed and mass. A train moving at 20 mph has more momentum than a bicyclist moving at the same speed. A car colliding at 5 mph does not cause as much damage as that same car colliding at 60 mph. For things moving in straight lines momentum is simply mass x speed. In astronomy most things move in curved paths so we gen
Angular momentum, as a basic definition, is r x p , where the x represents a cross product. Intuitively, this quantity can be best expressed as the tendency for an object to move AROUND a certain point. Angular momentum itself depends on the coordinate point you use as a reference point (usually the origin). To find the direction of the angular momentum vector, you point line up your hand with the point in question (assumed to be the origin) and point your index finger in the direction of the momentum perpendicular to the r vector. That is the direction of L, and it can be thought of as a line overlapping with the axis about which the object is rotating, whose length tells you how fast the object is rotating.
In physics, the angular momentum of a particle about an origin is a vector quantity related to rotation,[1] equal to the mass of the particle multiplied by the cross product of the position vector of the particle with its velocity vector.[2] The angular momentum of a system of particles is the sum of that of the particles within it.[3] Angular momentum is an important concept in both physics and engineering, with numerous applications. Angular momentum is important in physics because it is a conserved quantity: a system’s angular momentum stays constant unless an external torque acts on it. Rotational symmetry of space is related to the conservation of angular momentum as an example of Noether’s theorem. The conservation of angular momentum explains many phenomena in nature. Definition Angular momentum of a particle about a given origin is defined as: where: is the angular momentum of the particle, is the position vector of the particle relative to the origin, is the linear momentum of
