- #1
kevin heck
- 13
- 0
Homework Statement
Earth is commonly thought of as a sphere, but this is not true. Because of Earth's spin, it closely resembles an oblate spheroid, which is just a fancy name for "shaped like a squashed orange". The effect of this spin is a tidal bulge that forms at the equator so that the equatorial radius of Earth is about 21km greater than the polar radius of 6370km. The mass of Earth is 5.979*10^24kg.
a) calculate the accel. due to gravity at the North Pole using the definition of gravitational field.
mass Earth=5.979*10^24kg
radius Earth=6.370*10^6m
G=6.67*10^-11Nm2/kg2
accel. due to gravity=G(mass Earth)/radius Earth2
=9.83N/kg
b) same but for values at the equator. Accel. due to gravity=9.76N/kg.
c) Calculate the centripetal acceleration at the equator?
So i know my mass of Earth and radius of Earth. Also have the acceleration due to gravity for the equator. They formula I went with was
Fc=(mass Earth)(4)(pie)squared(radius Earth)/(T)squared
after substituting in all my numbers i got a solution that came out as N. Can you help steer me straight? Where did I go wrong?