How does Earth, or any other celestial body, keep spinning indefinitely?
In: Physics
The Earth’s spin is, in fact, slowing down… slowly, due to tidal effects, which in turn are down to gravity. But basically you’re looking at Newton’s First Law of Motion which states that an object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force. There are no external forces acting upon the earth, other than gravity (which cause it to rotate about the sun – a “straight line” in the geometry of the curved space it finds itself in, thank you gravity and Einstein) so it just carries on going [edit] and spinning… (well, I guess there are forces such as the solar wind, but they’re pretty negligable in this context.)
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