Researchers have found that our world, planet Earth is not as round as we thought of, and that it is not a pale blue dot. But how we know this? A supersensitive gravity detecting satellites showed us that the earth is a colorful, irregular lump, it looks like a tuber.
“Rotating potato — I don’t like this word,” said Roland Pail, a geoscientist at the Technical University of Munich. He and other researchers revealed the new map of the Earth’s gravity field on March 31 at a scientific workshop in Munich.
The new information will help us to improve our understanding of how the Earth works and improve predictions regarding the impacts of climate change.
The image represents a sort of theoretical sea level known as the “geoid”, a surface where the Publicar entradaocean would rest if not pushed around by internal currents, tides and the weather.
Gravity in the earth varies from place to place because of many factors, such as the presence of mountain ranges, the lump around Earth’s equator, and the moon’s gravitational influence.
This new snapshot comes from the European Space Agency’s GOCE satellite, launched in 2009 to map the geoid. GOCE dances along at the top of the atmosphere, using six special accelerometers to measure, many times a second, how the Earth’s gravity tugs on the spacecraft.
This is a great discovery because there was a 2 day conference on the GOCCE data in Munich, and they are finding ways in which this data will help us to understand better events like earthquakes or measuring ocean circulation, changes in sea level and movements of ice sheets.
“This field model is each time getting better and better”- a researcher says.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario