What would the period of rotation of Earth have to be for objects on the equator to have a centripetal acceleration with a magnitude of #9.80# #ms^-2#?
1 Answer
Fascinating question! See the calculation below, which shows that the rotational period would be
Explanation:
To answer this question we need to know the diameter of the earth. From memory it's about
The centripetal acceleration is given by
Remember that we know the acceleration we want and the radius, and need to know the period of rotation. We can start with the rotational velocity:
To find the rotational period, we need to invert this to give
This yields
We can divide this by 3600 to convert to hours, and find