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How Much Does Earth Weigh?

AUG 19, 2021
We can’t put Earth on a scale, but there are other ways to figure out the weight of our world.
Inside Science Contributor
How Much Does Earth Weigh?

(Inside Science) -- The Earth isn’t even close to being the largest planet in our solar system, but it’s also no lightweight, weighing in at a whopping 13 thousand, 170 billion trillion pounds, or 13,170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. To put that into context, a male African bush elephant tips the scale at 13,000 pounds. One trillion elephants would weigh 13,000,000,000,000,000 or 13 thousand trillion pounds, and the Earth weighs 1 billion times more than that! So, how did scientists determine the weight of our world? Since they can’t put Earth on a scale, experts studied the gravitational pull the planet has on other things and used math to calculate its size.

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