New answers tagged earth
6
Quick answer for now; the Earth's field has been more and more carefully measured by precise tracking of satellites over time. It stared with very careful visual tracking/timing and interferometrically tracking and recording the Doppler shift of the radio signals from late 1950's satellites like Sputnik and Vanguard and then many many others over the years, ...
1
I hope it's OK to answer an old question.
First, let me say that your proposal is creative. You've explained the possible creation of the asteroid belt (by collision - not impossible), and you've combined it with the formation of the moon by impact. That 2nd part is a little more problematic.
There's a principal in scientific theory and it applies to ...
0
I'm not sure how much this will add, but the points are exactly that - just points. Gravitational bodies are often reduced to points for the purpose of calculations, such as, centers of mass and barycenters are also points. The Lagrange points are the same - mathematically calculated points based on the two objects in orbit around their mutual barycenter....
3
From this source I get:
The size of these islands varies. Each planet in the solar system has
its own Lagrangian points. The islands of stability get bigger farther
from the Sun and also for more massive planets. The ones associated
with Earth are roughly 500,000 miles (800,000 kilometers) wide. The
biggest zones (at least in the solar system) ...
10
It wasn't one person. René Descartes had theorized that planets must be in the shape of prolate spheroids. Christiaan Huygens and then Isaac Newton theorized that a rotating, self-gravitating fluid body would relax itself into an oblate spheroid. So which view was correct? Giovanni Cassini argued strongly that Descartes' view was the correct one, and he ...
6
While it was suggested by other previously, I believe the first actual deduction of the shape by theory which resulted in a measurement was due to Pierre Louis Maupertuis.
It was Maupertuis who worked out the theory predicting Earth was an oblate spheroid and who also made measurements (on an expedition to Lapland) which confirmed this. His theoretical work ...
Top 50 recent answers are included
