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The spherical shape of the Earth was known and measured by astronomers, mathematicians, and navigators from a variety of literate ancient cultures, including the Hellenic World, and Ancient India. Greek ethnographer Megasthenes , c. 300 BC , has been interpreted as stating that the contemporary Brahmans of India believed in a spherical Earth as ...
With a spherical Earth, half the planet is in daylight at any given time and the other half experiences nighttime. When a given location on the spherical Earth is in sunlight, its antipode – the location exactly on the opposite side of Earth – is in darkness. The spherical shape of Earth causes the Sun to rise and set at different times in ...
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 ...
This argument was put forward by the geographer Strabo (c. 64 BC – 24 AD), who suggested that the spherical shape of Earth was probably known to seafarers around the Mediterranean Sea since at least the time of Homer, [39] citing a line from the Odyssey [40] as indicating that the poet Homer knew of this as early as the 7th or 8th century BC.
Spherical harmonics are often used to approximate the shape of the geoid. The current best such set of spherical harmonic coefficients is EGM2020 (Earth Gravitational Model 2020), determined in an international collaborative project led by the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (now the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA).
Topography globe featuring physical features of the Earth. A globe is a spherical model of Earth, of some other celestial body, or of the celestial sphere. Globes serve purposes similar to maps, but, unlike maps, they do not distort the surface that they portray except to scale it down. A model globe of Earth is called a terrestrial globe.
The myth of the flat Earth, or the flat-Earth error, is a modern historical misconception that European scholars and educated people during the Middle Ages believed the Earth to be flat. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] The earliest clear documentation of the idea of a spherical Earth comes from the ancient Greeks ( 5th century BC ).
Earth's western hemisphere showing topography relative to Earth's center instead of to mean sea level, as in common topographic maps. Earth has a rounded shape, through hydrostatic equilibrium, [85] with an average diameter of 12,742 kilometres (7,918 mi), making it the fifth largest planetary sized and largest terrestrial object of the Solar ...