How can there be an angle if earth is a sphere. A perfect ball doesn’t have a north does it.
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aren’t you talking about the angle the earth pivots?
The way the earth moves on itself is not the same as the way it moves around the sun. The difference is this angle
Imagine holding a basketball with line going directly up and down though the center. Now tilt it a little (23.5°). The ball is still a sphere, just a little tilted.
Our north is based on magnetic fields around the earth and those fields converge in on that imaginary line you just tilted. It is why compasses point North. So when you tilt the ball, the North goes with it.
Take a close-to-perfect-sphere.
Stick a wire through it from the bottom to the top.
Now tilt that wire roughly 23 degrees, such that the close-to-perfect-sphere is also tilted.
The sphere-ness of the Earth has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it’s tilted at an angle.
because the earth spins in a specific direction.
Also the earth isn’t a “perfect” sphere. It is 21km wider in one axis than the other. That is irrelevant to the definition that it can spin at an angle.
North is a magnetic field pole. Has nothing to do with the shape of the object.
The Earth’s axis of rotation is at a 23.5 degree angle, not the earth itself. The shape of the earth doesn’t really matter.
Imagine you spin a globe–those two little poles at the top and bottom that hold the globe in place while everything else spins around it is called the axis of rotation. Now if you zoom out to a solar system level, you still see the earth spinning while it orbits the sun. However, you’ll notice that the horizontal line of the earth’s equator does not line up with the line that you would draw if you tried to connect the earth to the Sun–the angle is off. That’s what people mean when they talk about axial tilt. I hope that makes sense?
A perfect ball *does* have a north and a south, if it’s rotating. It has an axis of rotation. (Twelve hours from now, Indonesia will be roughly where Brazil is right now, and vice-versa. On the other hand, the North Pole and South Pole will still be where they are right now. This makes the poles unique.)
There’s also the line from the Sun to the Earth. (At any given moment, there’s a unique spot on Earth where the Sun is directly overhead.)
We can compare the angle between these two lines.
Just the way it “wobbles” after billions of years forming and spinning around. Could be worse, though. We could be like Neptune where the tilt is over 95 degrees (possibly from a collision with another large object in the earlier days of Solar System)
The earth is a perfect sphere, but it is also spinning like a top. The spin of the earth is not perfectly vertical – it’s like a spinning top that is leaning over, and the amount the earth “leans over” on its spin, is 23 degrees off from perfectly vertical.
It’s the angle of earth’s rotation axis in relation to the solar plane. Too simple of a question, I needed to add this second sentence to not get my answer eradicated.
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