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Measured around the equator, it is 40,075.017 km (24,901.461 mi). Measured passing through the poles, the circumference is 40,007.863 km (24,859.734 mi). [1] Measurement of Earth's circumference has been important to navigation since ancient times. The first known scientific measurement and calculation was done by Eratosthenes, by comparing ...
The apparent solar time is a measure of Earth's rotation and the difference between it and the mean solar time is known as the equation of time. Stellar and sidereal day On a prograde planet like Earth, the stellar day is shorter than the solar day. At time 1, the Sun and a certain distant star are both overhead.
In geodesy, the figure of the Earth is the size and shape used to model planet Earth. The kind of figure depends on application, including the precision needed for the model. A spherical Earth is a well-known historical approximation that is satisfactory for geography , astronomy and many other purposes.
Aristarchus of Samos. Eratosthenes ( c. 276 – c. 194/195 BC ), a Greek mathematician who calculated the circumference of the Earth and also the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Hipparchus ( c. 190 – c. 120 BC ), a Greek mathematician who measured the radii of the Sun and the Moon as well as their distances from the Earth.
Earth radius (denoted as R🜨 or ) is the distance from the center of Earth to a point on or near its surface. Approximating the figure of Earth by an Earth spheroid, the radius ranges from a maximum of nearly 6,378 km (3,963 mi) ( equatorial radius, denoted a) to a minimum of nearly 6,357 km (3,950 mi) ( polar radius, denoted b ).
The geological history of the Earth follows the major geological events in Earth's past based on the geological time scale, a system of chronological measurement based on the study of the planet's rock layers ( stratigraphy ). Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago by accretion from the solar nebula, a disk-shaped mass of dust and gas left ...
The axial tilt is defined as the angle between the direction of the positive pole and the normal to the orbital plane. The angles for Earth, Uranus, and Venus are approximately 23°, 97°, and 177° respectively. In astronomy, axial tilt, also known as obliquity, is the angle between an object's rotational axis and its orbital axis, which is ...
The planet Earth has a rather slight equatorial bulge; its equatorial diameter is about 43 km (27 mi) greater than its polar diameter, with a difference of about 1 ⁄ 298 of the equatorial diameter. If Earth were scaled down to a globe with an equatorial diameter of 1 metre (3.3 ft), that difference would be only 3 mm (0.12 in).