According to the latest astronomical calculations, the mass of the Earth is 5.97×1024 kilograms. Annual measurements of this value clearly show that it is not absolutely constant. Its data fluctuate up to 50 thousand tons per year. The Earth is the largest in terms of diameter, mass and density among the terrestrial planets. Within the solar system, our planet is the third from the Sun and the fifth largest among all the others. It moves in an elliptical orbit around the Sun at an average distance of 149.6 million kilometers from it.
As the mass of the Earth changes, there are many opinions about the trends of these changes. On the one hand, this value is constantly increasing due to collisions with meteorites, which, burning up in the atmosphere, leave a large amount of dust deposited on the planet. On the other hand, ultraviolet solar radiation constantly breaks down water molecules in the upper atmosphere into oxygen and hydrogen. Part of the hydrogen, due to its light weight, escapes from the planet's gravitational field, which affects its mass.
From the beginning of the 19th century until the last decades of the 20th century, the theory of the expanding Earth was very popular among scientists around the world. The hypothesis of an increase in the volume of the planet led to the assumption that the mass of the Earth is also increasing. Throughout the existence of this theory, various scientists have proposed five options for its justification. Many well-known researchers, such as Kropotkin, Milanovsky, Steiner and Schneiderov, argued the expansion of the planet by its cyclic pulsations. Daquille, Myers, Club and Napier explained this assumption by the constant addition of meteorites and asteroids to the Earth. The most popular theory of expansion was the assumption that initially the core of our planet consisted of a superdense substance, which in the process of evolution turned into normal material, causing the gradual expansion of the Earth. In the last 50 years of the last century, several prominent physicists, such as Dirac, Jordan, Dicke, Ivanenko and Saggitov, expressed the view that the gravitational quantity decreases with time, and this leads to a natural expansion of the planet. Another hypothesis was the opinion of Kirillov, Neiman, Blinov and Veselov that the expansion of the Earth is caused by a cosmological cause associated with a secular evolutionary increase in its mass. Today, a large amount of evidence has emerged that refutes all these assumptions.
The theory of an expanding planet, based on the fact that the mass of the Earth is constantly increasing, has finally lost its appeal today. Internation althe group, which included the best scientists in the world, did not finally confirm it, so today this concept can peacefully go to the shelf of scientific archives.
According to the conclusion of a group of geophysicists who conducted research using modern space tools, the mass of planet Earth is a constant value. An employee of one of the scientific laboratories, W. Xiaoping, together with his colleagues, published an article in which he stated that the recorded fluctuations in the Earth's radius do not go beyond 0.1 millimeter (thickness of a human hair) per year. Such statistics indicate that the mass of the Earth does not change in values that allow us to talk about its expansion.
