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tidal force

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tidal force

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secondary effect of the force of gravity of one body on another

~16 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Figure 1: Tidal interaction between the spiral galaxy NGC 169 and a smaller companion

The tidal force or tide-generating force is the difference in gravitational attraction between different points in a gravitational field. It causes different parts of bodies to be pulled unevenly, as a result being stretched towards the attraction.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “tidal force” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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