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The pendulum was introduced in 1851 and was the first experiment to give simple, direct evidence of the Earth's rotation. Foucault followed up in 1852 with a gyroscope experiment to further demonstrate the Earth's rotation. Foucault pendulums today are popular displays in science museums and universities. [1]
Earth's rotation imaged by Deep Space Climate Observatory, showing tilt. Earth's rotation or Earth's spin is the rotation of planet Earth around its own axis, as well as changes in the orientation of the rotation axis in space. Earth rotates eastward, in prograde motion. As viewed from the northern polar star Polaris, Earth turns counterclockwise.
The spheroidal shape of the Earth is the result of the interplay between gravity and centrifugal force caused by the Earth's rotation about its axis. [18] [19] In his Principia, Newton proposed the equilibrium shape of a homogeneous rotating Earth was a rotational ellipsoid with a flattening f given by 1/230.
Foucault published two papers in 1852, one focused on astronomy with the weight free to move on all three axes (On a new experimental demonstration of the motion of the Earth, based on the fixity of the plane of rotation) [8] and the other on mechanics with the weight free to move on only two axes (On the orientation phenomena of rotating bodies driven by a fixed axis on the Earth's surface.
English: The Earth has taken a shape such that the sum of the gravitational force and the "centrifugal force" is orthogonal to its surface Date 12 December 2018
True polar wander is a solid-body rotation (or reorientation) of a planet or moon with respect to its spin axis, causing the geographic locations of the north and south poles to change, or "wander". In rotational equilibrium, a planetary body has the largest moment of inertia axis aligned with the spin axis, with the smaller two moments of ...
Aryabhata correctly insisted that the Earth rotates about its axis daily, and that the apparent movement of the stars is a relative motion caused by the rotation of the Earth, contrary to the then-prevailing view, that the sky rotated. [22]
Polar motion of the Earth is the motion of the Earth's rotational axis relative to its crust. [2]: 1 This is measured with respect to a reference frame in which the solid Earth is fixed (a so-called Earth-centered, Earth-fixed or ECEF reference frame). This variation is a few meters on the surface of the Earth.