Solar system

The sun's gravitational pull holds the earth and other planets in their orbits, just as the planets' gravitational pull keeps their moons in orbit around them.

Gravity is a common force. Newton was the first person to study it seriously, and he came up with the law of universal gravitation:

Each particle of matter attracts every other particle with a force which is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
The standard formula for gravity is:

Gravitational force = (G * m1 * m2) / (d2)
where G is the gravitational constant, m1 and m2 are the masses of the two objects for which you are calculating the force, and d is the distance between the centers of gravity of the two masses.

G has the value of 6.67 x 10E-8 dyne * cm2/gm2. That means that if you put two 1-gram objects 1 centimeter apart from one another, they will attract each other with the force of 6.67 x 10E-8 dyne. A dyne is equal to about 0.001 gram weight, meaning that if you have a dyne of force available, it can lift 0.001 grams in Earth's gravitational field. So 6.67 x 10E-8 dyne is a miniscule force. When you deal with massive bodies like the Earth, however, which has a mass of 6E+24 kilograms, it adds up to a rather powerful force. It is also interesting to think about the fact that every atom attracts every other atom in the universe in some small way!

Einstein later came along and redefined gravity, so there are now two models -- Newtonian and Einsteinian. Einsteinian gravitational theory has features that allow it to predict the motion of light around very massive objects and several other interesting phenomena. According to Encyclopedia Britannica:

The general theory of relativity addresses the problem of gravity and that of nonuniform, or accelerated, motion. In one of his famous thought-experiments, Einstein showed that it is not possible to distinguish between an inertial frame of reference in a gravitational field and an accelerated frame of reference. That is, an observer in a closed space capsule who found himself pressing down on his seat could not tell whether he and the capsule were at rest in a gravitational field, or whether he and the capsule were undergoing acceleration. From this principle of equivalence, Einstein moved to a geometric interpretation of gravitation. The presence of mass or concentrated energy causes a local curvature in the space-time continuum. This curvature is such that the inertial paths of bodies are no longer straight lines but some form of curved (orbital) path, and this acceleration is what is called gravitation.
If certain assumptions and simplifications are made, Einstein's equations handle Newtonian gravity as a subset