News

When you see a globe or other representation of Earth, it usually is shown as a perfect sphere, so many people may think that it is. The Earth, though, is what we call an Oblate Spheroid.
Isaac Newton first proposed that Earth was not perfectly round. Instead, he suggested it was an oblate spheroid—a sphere that is squashed at its poles and swollen at the equator. He was correct ...
From GPS satellites to airline navigation, this field provides the mathematical framework that proves Earth is an oblate spheroid, not a flat plane. Here’s how real-world data—rather than ...
It's actually a slightly oblate spheroid, or an ellipsoid. This means it is a little bit wider around the equator than it is tall, like a sphere that someone sat on and squashed a little bit.
An in-depth study conducted by NASA found that humans are responsible for the increasing wobble detected as Earth spins on its axis. When you think of Earth you may think of an exact sphere, but ...
(Inside Science) — Earth might look like a sphere, but it’s actually an “oblate spheroid” — the planet is slightly squished, making the circumference of the equator bigger than the ...
We all know the Earth is round. Not perfectly so but close enough. We live on an oblate spheroid, a slightly squashed sphere that's wider at the equator than around the poles. The difference ...
So the oblate spheroid shape is a sphere that appears to bulge at the equator. As a result, gravity is weakest at the equator and strongest at the poles. This is why, on the earth, objects fall to ...