Finding Mass Without a Scale

What is Mass?
The large asteroid Vesta, as photographed by the Dawn probe. Click for a much larger high-
resolution version.

When I teach any introductory-level course, I always ask my students to list the important
fundamental properties an object can have — properties that are unchanging under ordinary
conditions. They always remember to list mass, though they don’t always remember what mass is.
That’s perfectly understandable: mass is one of those fundamental concepts that’s a little slippery,
not least because the ways we have to measure mass are often indirect. Here’s a 2-fold definition
that works pretty well for the purposes of this post:

1. Mass is the property of an object that measures how hard it is to change its velocity (i.e.,
start it moving if it’s at rest, change its direction of motion, etc.); the more it resists change,
the greater its mass. Photons — particles of light — are massless because they move at the
same speed all the time. Gravity still affects them, but that’s another story.
2. Mass also dictates the strength of gravitational attraction: a larger mass will have a larger
gravitational influence on other objects. (That this is the same mass as in definition 1 is
called the equivalence principle, and is the starting point for Einstein’s general theory of
relativity. The equivalence principle definitely deserves its own post at some point.)

We’re spoiled in our daily lives, in an odd way: we can stand on an inexpensive scale and determine
our mass in kilograms. Sure, it’s not really mass that’s being measured — the scale is measuring
how much we compress a spring (or strain gauge in the case of an electronic scale), which has a
simple correspondence to mass. If you have any question about why the scale isn’t actually
measuring mass, just locate an elevator, stand on the scale, and — taking care to ignore the weird
looks you get — watch what happens to the reading as the elevator moves. Your mass isn’t
changing, but the force you exert on the scale is. At the extreme end of this kind of behavior, you
get free-fall, where your weight is zero even though gravity is still acting on you.

Even so, most of us aren’t going to be reading our weight on an elevator, so the scale you read in
your bathroom is a good proxy for mass. (Kilograms are the standard for mass in the international
system of units, but pounds are a unit of force. Mass in so-called “English” units is measured in
slugs.) However, things get a lot more complicated when you can’t put an object on a scale — when
the object in question is either too big or too small. In both of these cases, though, we have ways.
Oh yes…we have our ways.

Big Stuff: Using Gravity to Measure Mass

I had been intending to write a post on this subject for a while, but the specific impetus to write it
today is the arrival of the Dawn probe at the asteroid Vesta. At present, Dawn is in orbit around the
asteroid, but at a large altitude for safety — Vesta’s mass is not currently known very precisely and
without that, the gravitational strength is unknown. By the very act of orbiting, Dawn will be able to
measure the mass of Vesta, which in turn will tell us a lot about its composition.

The method for measuring mass through orbiting is also how we know the mass of Earth (through
the orbit of the Moon), the mass of the Sun (through all the planets), the mass of Jupiter (through its
moons), and also the mass of many stars (which are frequently in binary systems). The seed of this
technique goes all the way back to Johannes Kepler, the 17th century astronomer who formulated
three laws of planetary motion. We only need his third law, which in combination with Isaac
Newton’s law of gravity yields a very simple relationship between the average distance between a
satellite and the object it’s orbiting (usually labeled a), the length of time an orbit takes (labeled P),
and the mass of the object being orbited (M).

A simple orbit to illustrate Kepler's third law. Images are adapted from http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/

In equation form, Kepler’s third law is which isn’t that hard to understand, even if your math
allergies are strong:

1. The larger the mass of the object being orbited, the less time it will take a satellite to
complete an orbit of a certain size;
2. If two satellites are orbiting the same object at different distances, the satellite that is farther
away will take more time to complete its orbit;
3. If you can measure the size of an orbit and the time to complete an orbit, you have the mass
of the object being orbited!

In the case of most planets or other objects with natural satellites, Kepler’s third law is the best
means we have of determining mass. In the case of moonless Mercury and Venus, the first truly
accurate mass measurements were made by robotic probes, which played the role of artificial
satellites; the Dawn mission will perform the same measurement for Vesta as it orbits the asteroid
over the next year, then repeat the process for the largest asteroid, Ceres (also considered a dwarf
planet, along with Pluto).

To summarize the story so far: without a direct way to take the mass of astronomical objects like
planets, asteroids, and so forth, we rely on a detailed understanding of satellite motion to find the
mass from motion. Keep that idea in mind as we turn our attention to….

Small Stuff: Using Magnetic Fields to Measure Mass

Gravity is the force of nature that holds the Solar System together, and keeps moons orbiting around
their host body. On microscopic scales, other forces dominate, notably the electromagnetic force,
which is responsible for holding atoms together. Mass is still going to play a role in resisting change
of motion (definition 1 from above), but there won’t be a set of Kepler’s laws to guide us.

Electron orbit in a magnetic field. The orbit is circular -- we're seeing the setup at an angle for
clarity. The arrow indicate direction of revolution; protons would orbit the opposite way.

Instead, let’s look at how an electrically-charged particle behaves in a magnetic field. The figure
shows a schematic view of a large magnet, and the motion of an electron within that field: the
electron follows a circular orbit! The diameter of the orbit depends on how strong the magnetic field
is…and the mass of the electron. If you put a proton into this setup, you will also get a circular
orbit, but because the proton is much more massive than an electron, it will have a larger orbit for
the same magnetic field, since it’s that much harder to make it change its path of motion. It will also
orbit in the opposite direction, since it’s a positive charge, as opposed to the negatively-charged
electron, which is a simple way to distinguish positive from negative.

(Of course, you need an experiment to measure the electric charge independently of mass, but such
things do exist. You may even have performed a classic version in high school or college: the
Millikan oil-drop experiment.)
What I’ve described here is just a skeleton experiment; realistic experiments (carrying names like
mass spectrometers and bubble chambers) necessarily have more detailed procedures to get
everything right, just as I glossed over exactly how space probes measure distance and time. High-
energy particle experiments have other ways of measuring mass as well, but things can be
complicated if a particle is neutral — as with neutrinos, whose mass we still haven’t determined
except to say that it’s much smaller than any other measured particle mass.

Farther Afield
Because mass can’t be determined directly, it’s a difficult physical properties to measure, no matter
how fundamental it is. To make it worse, things can get tricky when interactions between objects
are strong. The mass of a proton inside a nucleus is not the same as its mass when it is free, for
example — part of the proton’s mass gets changed into energy (using Einstein’s famous E = m c2
equation) that is used to bind the nucleus together. Another challenge is that the Standard Model, the
most widely-accepted theory for particles and interactions, has no way to predict the masses of
elementary particles from first principles, so we don’t have a theoretical prediction with which to
compare our experimental results. That’s all a subject for another day!

Mass dictates the evolutionary path of a star or a black hole on the astronomical scale, and relates to
a lot of the interestingly strange quantum properties on the smallest size scale. Two of the most
important questions anyone can ask of a scientist is “how do we know? how can we measure?”
Think on that as you watch the news of the Dawn probe and the Large Hadron Collider.