Timeline for Are we slightly lighter during the day and slightly heavier at night, owing to the force of the Sun's gravity?

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Jun 27, 2014 at 1:29	comment	added	sashkello		@JohnFeminella Your mistake is pretty subtle here (leading to huge error in numbers). You are forgetting about acceleration. g_S pulls you and everything on Earth towards the Sun, and so we are rotating around it, and our acceleration in any part of the Earth is the same. The difference in weight comes from the fact that g_S is different for O1 and O2. They both experience the same acceleration and the same pull from the Earth's gravity. So, `g_S_1 - g_S_2` is the difference.
Jun 25, 2014 at 20:30	history	edited	Christoph	CC BY-SA 3.0	more details
Jun 25, 2014 at 16:53	history	edited	John Rennie	CC BY-SA 3.0	spherical cows? :-)
Jun 25, 2014 at 15:52	comment	added	John Feminella		Can you explain a little more why the relative acceleration is the correct way to look at it? I'm imagining a one-dimensional free-body diagram with the Sun (S), the Earth (E), an observer O1 on the daylight Earth side, and an observer O2 on the night-time Earth side all in a straight line, with the Earth at the origin. O1 experiences a weight of g_E and a negative force of g_S (g_E - g_S); O2 experiences a weight of g_E and a positive force of g_S (g_E + g_S). In this system the only objects are the observers, the Earth, and the Sun. What's incorrect here?
Jun 25, 2014 at 15:25	history	answered	Christoph	CC BY-SA 3.0