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The curvature of the Earth is evident in the horizon across the image, and the bases of the buildings on the far shore are below that horizon and hidden by the sea. The simplest model for the shape of the entire Earth is a sphere. The Earth's radius is the distance from Earth's center to its surface, about 6,371 km (3,959 mi). While "radius ...
Near Earth's surface, the acceleration due to gravity, accurate to 2 significant figures, is 9.8 m/s 2 (32 ft/s 2). This means that, ignoring the effects of air resistance, the speed of an object falling freely will increase by about 9.8 metres per second (32 ft/s) every second.
Both men's figures for the Earth's circumference were uncannily accurate, aided in each case by mutually compensating errors in measurement. However, the version of Posidonius' calculation popularised by Strabo was revised by correcting the distance between Rhodes and Alexandria to 3,750 stadia, resulting in a circumference of 180,000 stadia ...
As the science of geodesy measured Earth more accurately, the shape of the geoid was first found not to be a perfect sphere but to approximate an oblate spheroid, a specific type of ellipsoid. More recent [when?] measurements have measured the geoid to unprecedented accuracy, revealing mass concentrations beneath Earth's surface.
From this it follows that the average density of Earth is approximately 1.8 times the density of the mountain. [15] [18] [19] Hutton took a density of 2,500 kg·m −3 for Schiehallion, and announced that the density of the Earth was 1.8 times this, or 4,500 kg·m −3, [18] less than 20% away from the modern value of 5,515 kg·m −3. [20]
On a flat Earth, a Sun that shines in all directions would illuminate the entire surface at the same time, and all places would experience sunrise and sunset at the horizon at about the same time. With a spherical Earth, half the planet is in daylight at any given time and the other half experiences nighttime.
Earth is rounded into an ellipsoid with a circumference of about 40,000 km. It is the densest planet in the Solar System. Of the four rocky planets, it is the largest and most massive. Earth is about eight light-minutes away from the Sun and orbits it, taking a year (about 365.25 days) to complete one revolution.
Instead, the result was originally expressed as the relative density of Earth, [5] or equivalently the mass of Earth. His experiment gave the first accurate values for these geophysical constants. The experiment was devised sometime before 1783 by geologist John Michell, [6] [7] who constructed a torsion balance apparatus for it. However ...