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Medieval artistic representation of a spherical Earth – with compartments representing earth, air, and water (c. 1400) The Erdapfel, the oldest surviving terrestrial globe (1492/1493) The spherical shape of the Earth was known and measured by astronomers, mathematicians, and navigators from a variety of literate ancient cultures, including ...
The Earth's radius is the distance from Earth's center to its surface, about 6,371 km (3,959 mi). While "radius" normally is a characteristic of perfect spheres, the Earth deviates from spherical by only a third of a percent, sufficiently close to treat it as a sphere in many contexts and justifying the term "the radius of the Earth".
Earth science or geoscience includes all fields of natural science related to the planet Earth. [1] This is a branch of science dealing with the physical, chemical, and biological complex constitutions and synergistic linkages of Earth's four spheres: the biosphere , hydrosphere / cryosphere , atmosphere , and geosphere (or lithosphere ).
Adherence to the geocentric model stemmed largely from several important observations. First of all, if the Earth did move, then one ought to be able to observe the shifting of the fixed stars due to stellar parallax. Thus if the Earth was moving, the shapes of the constellations should change considerably over the course of a year. As they did ...
The ancient Greeks assumed the literal truth of stars attached to a celestial sphere, revolving about the Earth in one day, and a fixed Earth. [9] The Eudoxan planetary model , on which the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic models were based, was the first geometric explanation for the "wandering" of the classical planets . [ 10 ]
In Greek antiquity the ideas of celestial spheres and rings first appeared in the cosmology of Anaximander in the early 6th century BC. [7] In his cosmology both the Sun and Moon are circular open vents in tubular rings of fire enclosed in tubes of condensed air; these rings constitute the rims of rotating chariot-like wheels pivoting on the Earth at their centre.
The lithosphere, however, only refers to the uppermost layers of the solid Earth (oceanic and continental crustal rocks and uppermost mantle). [ 3 ] Since space exploration began, it has been observed that the extent of the ionosphere or plasmasphere is highly variable, and often much larger than previously appreciated, at times extending to ...
The seven heavens and the sublunar spheres, from an engraving of Albertus Magnus' Philosophia naturalis.. Plato and Aristotle helped to formulate the original theory of a sublunary sphere in antiquity, [4] the idea usually going hand in hand with geocentrism and the concept of a spherical Earth.