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Does the sun go around the Earth?

1 in 4 Americans surveyed answered incorrectly

'Does the Earth go around the sun, or does the sun go around the Earth?' A National Science Foundation (NSF) study[1] involving 2,200 participants find that about 25 percent[2] of Americans got this question wrong.

For europeans: please remember only 66 percent of European Union residents answered correctly to the same question... [3]

More interestingly, from a scientific point a view, both answers are wrong: both earth and sun are going around the 'center of mass' (barycenter) [5] of the sun-earth system [4].

Legend

Sources

  • [1] description of the NSF study: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/index.cfm/overview
  • [2] NSF, detailed data for the NSF study, 2014: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/index.cfm/appendix/tables.htm
  • [3] European Commission, "Europeans, Science and Technology" [Eurobarometer], 2005: http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_224_report_en.pdf
  • [4] http://zidbits.com/2011/09/the-earth-doesnt-actually-orbit-the-sun/
  • [5] wikipedia page on Barycentric coordinates (astronomy): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_coordinates_(astronomy)

Tags

gender: both
scope: USA
topic: education
topic:population

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