bjones
|
The Earth is not flat. It is a vaguely spheroid object, which means it is kind of in the shape of a ball. The ground may appear flat to you at certain places, but that is because you are so small in comparison to the Earth, and you are so close to the surface. As you get further away from the surface of the Earth or if you could get larger, you would see that the Earth is not flat at all. Similarly, if you were shrunk down to bacteria size and put on a beach ball, the surface of the beach ball would also appear flat.
Now that you know that the Earth is a spheroid, which most people simply call round, you may be wondering how it got that way. Earth, all the other planets, and stars are all spheres or spheroid objects because of the force of gravity. Now, scientists don’t exactly know what gravity is, but they have studied it enough to know how it affects matter.
When the Earth was first formed, it was a very hot collection of matter. In fact, Earth spent a long time in a molten liquid stated because it was so hot. The larger a mass becomes, the stronger its pull of gravity. The pull of gravity is towards the center of the object, and it pulls equally on all sides. When the planet was still molten and liquid, gravity formed it into a spheroid. Later, when the Earth cooled down and hardened, it hardened into the same shape in which it was formed as a liquid.
The Earth is not a perfect sphere, which is why I keep calling it a spheroid. This is because the Earth is travelling around the sun at about 67,000 miles per hour and it is spinning around on its axis at over 1,000 miles per hour. This revolving and spinning makes the Earth bulge slightly around its center.
 Posted 4579 day ago
|