• Question: how does the earth spin

    Asked by SEAN to William, Karen, Jasmine on 16 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Karen

      Karen answered on 16 Nov 2018:


      Scientists think that our galaxy formed when a big cloud of dust and gas collapsed because of it’s own weight, the sun was formed from most of the gas, and then the collapse made the remaining dust and gas start to spin around the sun. They think that while the earth was slowly spinning it was hit by bigger planets (which they think knocked off the rock that became our moon) and the hit caused the earth to spin faster. Because space doesn’t have a lot of friction (friction is a force that causes things to slow down, like how brakes cause friction on the tyres of your car to slow the car) the earth has just kept spinning since then! The spinning is actually slowing down too, meaning that a day on Earth is 1.7 milliseconds slower than it was 100 years ago, but this change is too small to bother us đŸ™‚ Earth spins once in a day, which means that we get an even spread of sunlight around the world, one of the reasons we have life on earth đŸ™‚

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