The world isn’t round either. My cousin, before she retired, was in charge of the geoid work at JPL, the geoid being the actual shape of the earth as used by GPS.
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So from this we can infer that there are some seriously dense people living in Cleveland?
Centripetal force is not a difference in gravity, though. (The Earth’s diameter is larger at the equator, which is a gravitational difference, larger than what this map is recording but not as large as centripetal effects, IIRC). It did serve as a homework problem in one of my undergrad physics classes - basically, how much higher can Olympic athletes jump when the games are held in an equatorial country, assuming the force they can apply is the same? (Makes for interesting questions about setting world records)
Also - just to make sure it’s said (even though it’s obvious to most of us here) - this may be an anomaly for geodesy and geophysics, but it is not at all an anomaly for fundamental physics, which I expect is what the title and the warped-space drawing suggest.
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Well yeah they’re just mascons, like on the moon but not as dramatic.
Years ago I remember reading about this place where gravity seemed to be offset from the horizontal (if that makes any sense at all). The trick was that a car would roll down hill on an apparently level road. It was close to a large mountain and I think it was mostly an optical illusion but the gravitational field of the mountain may have played a part.
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“A part,” technically, but it’s the optical illusion of seemingly-but-not-actually-level ground that is the only meaningful contributor. The mountain alone would only get you a tiny fraction of 1% of the way to overcoming static friction.
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Mother Earth? Yeah, she’s kind of bulgy in the middle.
“The Faster We Go, The Rounder We Get”
and a nice cover by Motorpsycho
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