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The sphere has the smallest surface area of all surfaces that enclose a given volume, and it encloses the largest volume among all closed surfaces with a given surface area. [11] The sphere therefore appears in nature: for example, bubbles and small water drops are roughly spherical because the surface tension locally minimizes surface area.
If the sphere is isometrically embedded in Euclidean space, the sphere's intersection with a plane is a circle, which can be interpreted extrinsically to the sphere as a Euclidean circle: a locus of points in the plane at a constant Euclidean distance (the extrinsic radius) from a point in the plane (the extrinsic center). A great circle lies ...
The ratio of the volume of a sphere to the volume of its circumscribed cylinder is 2:3, as was determined by Archimedes. The principal formulae derived in On the Sphere and Cylinder are those mentioned above: the surface area of the sphere, the volume of the contained ball, and surface area and volume of the cylinder.
A sphere (top), rotational ellipsoid (left) and triaxial ellipsoid (right) The volume of a sphere of radius R is . Given the volume of a non-spherical object V, one can calculate its volume-equivalent radius by setting = or, alternatively:
The two effects exactly cancel each other out. In the extreme case of the smallest possible sphere, the cylinder vanishes (its radius becomes zero) and the height equals the diameter of the sphere. In this case the volume of the band is the volume of the whole sphere, which matches the formula given above.
For example, assuming the Earth is a sphere of radius 6371 km, the surface area of the arctic (north of the Arctic Circle, at latitude 66.56° as of August 2016 [7]) is 2π ⋅ 6371 2 | sin 90° − sin 66.56° | = 21.04 million km 2 (8.12 million sq mi), or 0.5 ⋅ | sin 90° − sin 66.56° | = 4.125% of the total surface area of the Earth.
Thus, the segment volume equals the sum of three volumes: two right circular cylinders one of radius a and the second of radius b (both of height /) and a sphere of radius /. The curved surface area of the spherical zone—which excludes the top and bottom bases—is given by =.
r is the radius of the sphere, h is the height of the cap, and; sr is the unit, steradian, sr = rad 2. Because the surface area A of a sphere is 4πr 2, the definition implies that a sphere subtends 4π steradians (≈ 12.56637 sr) at its centre, or that a steradian subtends 1/4π ≈ 0.07958 of a sphere.