Gravitation, or gravity, is a natural phenomenon by which physical bodies attract with a force proportional to their mass.

In everyday life, gravitation is most familiar as the agent that gives weight to objects with mass and causes them to fall to the ground when dropped. Gravitation causes dispersed matter to coalesce, and coalesced matter to remain intact, thus accounting for the existence of the Earth, the Sun, and most of the macroscopic objects in the universe. Gravitation is responsible for keeping the Earth and the other planets in their orbits around the Sun; for keeping the Moon in its orbit around the Earth; for the formation of tides; for natural convection, by which fluid flow occurs under the influence of a density gradient and gravity; for heating the interiors of forming stars and planets to very high temperatures; and for various other phenomena observed on Earth. Gravitation is one of the four fundamental interactions of nature, along with the strong force, electromagnetism and the weak force. Modern physics describes gravitation using the general theory of relativity, in which gravitation is a consequence of the curvature of spacetime which governs the motion of inertial objects. The simpler Newton's law of universal gravitation provides an accurate approximation for most calculations.

gravitational force - (physics) the force of attraction between all masses in the universe; especially the attraction of the earth's mass for bodies near its surface; "the more remote the body the less the gravity"; "the gravitation between two bodies is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them"; "gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love"--Albert Einstein

Black Hole Properties An object whose entire mass M lies within rs is considered to be a black hole. Event horizon is the name given to rs, because from that radius the escape velocity from the black hole's gravity is the speed of light. Black holes draw mass in through gravitational forces, but none of that mass can ever escape. A black hole is often explained in terms of an object or mass "falling into" it. Y Watches X Fall Into a Black Hole

Y observes idealized clocks on X slowing down, freezing in time when X hits rs Y observes light from X redshift, reaching infinity at rs (thus X becomes invisible - yet somehow we can still see their clocks. Isn't theoretical physics grand?) X perceives noticeable change, in theory, though once it crosses rs it is impossible for it to ever escape from the gravity of the black hole. (Even light cannot escape the event horizon.) Black Holes from Relativity

Within months of Einstein's publication of general relativity in 1916, the physicist Karl Schwartzchild produced a solution to Einstein's equation for a spherical mass (called the Schwartzchild metric) ... with unexpected results. The term expressing the radius had a disturbing feature. It seemed that for a certain radius, the denominator of the term would become zero, which would cause the term to "blow up" mathematically. This radius, known as the Schwartzchild radius, rs, is defined as: rs = 2GM/c2 G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass, and c is the speed of light.