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Since the area of a triangle cannot be negative the spherical excess is always positive. It is not necessarily small, because the sum of the angles may attain 5 π (3 π for proper angles). For example, an octant of a sphere is a spherical triangle with three right angles, so that the excess is π /2.
An area formula for spherical triangles analogous to the formula for planar triangles. Given a fixed base , an arc of a great circle on a sphere, and two apex points and on the same side of great circle , Lexell's theorem holds that the surface area of the spherical triangle is equal to that of if and only if lies on the small-circle arc , where and are the points antipodal to and , respectively.
A triangle with sides a, b, and c. In geometry, Heron's formula (or Hero's formula) gives the area of a triangle in terms of the three side lengths , , . Letting be the semiperimeter of the triangle, = (+ +), the area is [1]
The sum of the angles of a spherical triangle is not equal to 180°. A sphere is a curved surface, but locally the laws of the flat (planar) Euclidean geometry are good approximations. In a small triangle on the face of the earth, the sum of the angles is only slightly more than 180 degrees. A sphere with a spherical triangle on it.
Spherical triangle solved by the law of cosines. Given a unit sphere, a "spherical triangle" on the surface of the sphere is defined by the great circles connecting three points u , v , and w on the sphere (shown at right).
The excess, or area, of small triangles is very small. For example, consider an equilateral spherical triangle with sides of 60 km on a spherical Earth of radius 6371 km; the side corresponds to an angular distance of 60/6371=.0094, or approximately 10 −2 radians (subtending an angle of 0.57
The area of a triangle can be demonstrated, for example by means of the congruence of triangles, as half of the area of a parallelogram that has the same base length and height. A graphic derivation of the formula T = h 2 b {\displaystyle T={\frac {h}{2}}b} that avoids the usual procedure of doubling the area of the triangle and then halving it.
Spherical triangle solved by the law of cosines. Versions similar to the law of cosines for the Euclidean plane also hold on a unit sphere and in a hyperbolic plane. In spherical geometry, a triangle is defined by three points u, v, and w on the unit sphere, and the arcs of great circles connecting those points.