Why is the world round?

Answer 1

The Earth's gravity acts on objects with a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance of the object from the center of the Earth. This includes parts of the Earth that are not at the center. If the earth were cubical, the points of the cubes would be giant mountains. The lower parts would collapse from the gravitational pull on the upper parts. The mountain would crumble. Earth's present mountains don't crumble because they are not high enough. Gravity causes parts of the Earth's surface to crumble like this until all parts of the Earth's surface are equidistant from the center. That makes the Earth a sphere.

No, the Earth is not quite a sphere. Centrifugal force from rotation makes the Equator bulge out, so the highest mountains on the Earth are in the Andes. Further, differences in altitude are deviations from roundness or even oblate spheroidness. However, these deviations are miniscule compared to the size of the Earth, so that the Earth is close enough to round to appear so from outer space.

Answer 2

Because of gravity. For all intent and purposes, the planet is made up of loose rocks that, over a (long) period of time, essentially behave like a slow moving liquid (actually, most of Earth is made of molten lava, go down only 1% of the way to the center, and you are in the hot liquid alreay)
Now, let's assume for a moment that Earth was not a spheroid, let's say it is a cube. So there you are, in the middle of a "face" and all is OK for you. But straight out in 4 directions are the corners of the cube. Except that those corners are actually further from the center than the middle of the face, and are equivalent to extremely high mountains. Those would then tend to crumble under their own weight, until they are more or less even with the "plains".
This principle explains why any sufficiently large body, having enough of a gravity that can overcome the inertia of rocks (or molten lava) to rearrange itself will fall into a close approximation of a sphere. Spinning it around and the presence of the moon only adds minute deviations to this overall shape, while internal pressure and continental drift create mountains that are, once again, mere fraction of a percent deviation from a perfect sphere.

Answer 3

If you mean, Why do people believe the world is round?
- during a Luna eclipse, the shadow of the earth blocks out the moon. As the eclipse starts and ends, you can see the roundish shape of the earth there
- if you believe NASA, astronaughts have gone far enough out and looked back at the round earth
- Most planets and moons seen are also round. (although one of Saturns moons looks more like an apple with a chunk bitten out of it

Remember also, that our moon influences the tides. So including the oceans, Earth wobbles like a jelly as the moon's orbit pulls tides.

Answer 4

It's not a perfect sphere, it's more like an egg. It gets thinner towards the poles and more large towards the middle, near the equator. The Earth is this shape because gravity tends to even up things so there's no corners. The only reason asteroids aren't round is because they aren't big enough to have gravity as a factor in their shape.

Answer 5

Earth is a planet. When the solar system formed a few billion years ago, there where perhaps 11 bands of rock and dust around the sun. One of them where present day Earth is. As time went on, this rock and dust became attracted to each other, and clumped together. These clumps got bigger and bigger and the bigger it got the more gravity it had. And as rock and dust rained down on this big rock we call Earth, everything fell in random spots. That is why the Earth is round.

Answer 6

The world was once square, or so our ancestors once thought that it was square. I suppose, that the world got round by going in circles around the Sun. Now we are finding that the world is getting egg shaped or oval , then what is the world going to be like in the future? Could our world be constantly changing shape?

Answer 7

Gravity pulls all parts of the Earth evenly, trying to keep all parts the same distance form the center. Rotation causes it to be a "slightly oblate spheroid", meaning it has a small bulge around the equator.

Answer 8

Because a sphere is the most efficient geometric shape to contain a certain amount of matter. Soap bubbles take the shape of a sphere for the same reason.
Matter is kept together by gravity, which is a general quality of all matter.

Answer 9

The world is not round.

Answer 10

It's because gravity works at all angles, sucking in the mass of smaller objects till their is no more objects to suck up. The Earth is still sucking up about 120 tons of space particals a year. It works like the machine that puts cotton candy on the stick or toliet paper on a roll.