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The roughly spherical shape of Earth can be empirically evidenced by many different types of observation, ranging from ground level, flight, or orbit. The spherical shape causes a number of effects and phenomena that when combined disprove flat Earth beliefs. These include the visibility of distant objects on Earth's surface; lunar eclipses ...
Spherical Earth or Earth's curvature refers to the approximation of the figure of the Earth to a sphere. The concept of a spherical Earth gradually displaced earlier beliefs in a flat Earth during classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. The figure of the Earth is more accurately described as an ellipsoid, which was realized in the early modern ...
The concept of a spherical Earth dates back to around the 6th century BC, [2] but remained a matter of philosophical speculation until the 3rd century BC. The first scientific estimation of the radius of the Earth was given by Eratosthenes about 240 BC, with estimates of the accuracy of Eratosthenes's measurement ranging from −1% to 15%.
However, it contains clear proofs of Earth's sphericity in the first chapter. [89] [90] Many scholastic commentators on Aristotle's On the Heavens and Sacrobosco's Treatise on the Sphere unanimously agreed that Earth is spherical or round. [91] Grant observes that no author who had studied at a medieval university thought that Earth was flat. [92]
The above equation describes the Earth's gravitational potential, not the geoid itself, at location ,,, the co-ordinate being the geocentric radius, i.e., distance from the Earth's centre. The geoid is a particular equipotential surface, [ 27 ] and is somewhat involved to compute.
The world (heavens) is spherical, as is the Earth, and the land and water make a single globe. The celestial bodies, including the Earth, have regular circular and everlasting movements. The Earth rotates on its axis and around the Sun. [5] Answers to why the ancients thought the Earth was central. The order of the planets around the Sun and ...
Between 640 and 720 million years ago, the Earth was covered in ice, snagging it the modern nickname “Snowball Earth.” Recently, researchers found a rock formation that shows the transition ...
As P 0 n (x) = −P 0 n (−x) non-zero coefficients J n for odd n correspond to a lack of symmetry "north–south" relative the equatorial plane for the mass distribution of Earth. Non-zero coefficients C n m, S n m correspond to a lack of rotational symmetry around the polar axis for the mass distribution of Earth, i.e. to a "tri-axiality" of ...