But! This bulgy “ellipsoid” Earth isn't the whole story either.

但圆的地球并不是我们要探讨的全部内容。

In 2006, data gathered by Nasa's Wilkinson satellite suggested that the Universe itself may be an ellipsoid — an oval.

2006 年，美国国家航空航天局的威尔星收集的数据表明，宇宙本身可能是一个圆体——圆形。

But Newton's claim could be tested on an ellipsoid.

但牛顿的论断可以在一个球体上得到验证。

And that's tricky to do because it turns out the Earth isn't a perfect ellipsoid either.

这做起来很手，因为事实证明地球不是一个完美的球体。

They were also able to use this data to calculate the perimeter of this ellipsoid.

他们还能够利用这些数据来计算这个球体的周长。

It's not a sphere, not an ellipsoid.

它既球体，球体。

Then we said, no, it's this ellipsoid.

于是我们又说，不，它是这种球体。

There'd be large swaths of the Earth that are just barely under the ellipsoid of some that are above it.

地球上有大片区域几乎都在球体之下，有些则位于其上方。

And so in 1984, the US Defense Mapping Agency settled on an approximation, an ellipsoid centered exactly at the Earth's center of mass.

因此， 1984年， 美国国防制图局确定了一个近似值，即一个精确位于地球质心中心的球体。

Ecuador's monument to the equator is 240m off, and the circumference of the ellipsoid that best matches Earth's actual shape isn't a perfect 40,000km.

厄瓜多尔的赤道纪念碑偏离了实际赤道线240米，而与地球实际形状最匹配的球体的周长并精确的40,000公里，而是40,007.863公里。

These dense lumps of rock bump out from the ellipsoid and their mass gravitationally attracts oceans, while valleys in the ocean floor have less mass and the oceans flow away, shallower.

这些稠密的岩石块从球体中碰撞出来，它们的质量在引力作用下吸引着海洋，而海床上的峡谷质量较小，上方的海水因此流走。

This is the ellipsoid we used today, the one that's published by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency And it's the foundation of the coordinate system used by GPS.

这是我们今天使用的球体，由美国国家地理空间情报局发布， 是GPS所用坐标系统的基础。

And then with a bunch of trigonometry, they could figure out the distance from A to B. And this sort of arduous process proved that, yeah, the Earth was an ellipsoid.

然后通过大量的三角运算，他们能够计算出A到B的距离。 这种艰苦的过程证明了，是的， 地球是一个球体。