Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 Physics: How Big Is This Moon?

Rhett Allain
7 min readFeb 26, 2023
Screenshot from the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 trailer.

I have no idea what’s really going on with this scene from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 trailer. But a lack of knowledge can’t stop me from analyzing this motion. Really, in case you haven’t look at my past blog posts this is what I like to do. Take something from a trailer and see what physics I can figure out. So, let’s do it.

When a new trailer comes out, I will watch it several times to see if there is something physics related. In this case, there’s a very short clip showing the Guardians seemingly running on an asteroid or maybe a moon (it really could be anything). However, it seems to be in a low gravitational field. Here’s what it looks like.

Image: Marvel Studios / Disney.

Now for some physics.

Video Analysis

I’m going to look at Star Lord in this motion (pretty sure he’s the one in the yellow space suit). Once he leaves the surface of the asteroid (again, that’s my assumption), there is only one force acting on him — the downward gravitational force. We can calculate the magnitude of this force as the product of Star Lord’s mass (m) and the gravitational field (g). Note, we are NOT assuming that g is equal to…

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Rhett Allain

Physics faculty, science blogger of all things geek. Technical Consultant for CBS MacGyver and MythBusters. WIRED blogger.