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Gravity decreases with altitude as one rises above the Earth's surface because greater altitude means greater distance from the Earth's centre. All other things being equal, an increase in altitude from sea level to 9,000 metres (30,000 ft) causes a weight decrease of about 0.29%.
At a fixed point on the surface, the magnitude of Earth's gravity results from combined effect of gravitation and the centrifugal force from Earth's rotation. [2] [3] At different points on Earth's surface, the free fall acceleration ranges from 9.764 to 9.834 m/s 2 (32.03 to 32.26 ft/s 2), [4] depending on altitude, latitude, and longitude.
The force of gravity is weakest at the equator because of the centrifugal force caused by the Earth's rotation and because points on the equator are furthest from the center of the Earth. The force of gravity varies with latitude and increases from about 9.780 m/s 2 at the Equator to about 9.832 m/s 2 at the poles. [80] [81]
In classical mechanics, a gravitational field is a physical quantity. [5] A gravitational field can be defined using Newton's law of universal gravitation.Determined in this way, the gravitational field g around a single particle of mass M is a vector field consisting at every point of a vector pointing directly towards the particle.
The change in potential energy moving from the surface (a distance from the center) to a height above the surface is = + = (+ /). If / is small, as it must be close to the surface where is constant, then this expression can be simplified using the binomial approximation + / to [()] (). As the gravitational field is = /, this reduces to .
Length of a meridian on Earth (distance between Earth's poles along the surface) [37] 40.075 Mm Length of Earth's equator: 10 8: 100 Mm: 142.984 Mm Diameter of Jupiter: 299.792 Mm Distance traveled by light in vacuum in one second (a light-second, exactly 299,792,458 m by definition of the speed of light) 384.4 Mm Moon's orbital distance from ...
During the 1960s, spacecraft traveling above Earth's poles discovered a stream of particles flowing out of the Earth's poles, and theorized that there must be an unknown field driving these ...
Approximate light signal travel times; Distance: Time: one foot: 1.0 ns: one metre: 3.3 ns: from geostationary orbit to Earth: 119 ms: the length of Earth's equator: 134 ms: from Moon to Earth: 1.3 s: from Sun to Earth (1 AU) 8.3 min: one light year: 1.0 year: one parsec: 3.26 years: from nearest star to Sun (1.3 pc) 4.2 years: from the nearest ...