If the Earth actually takes 23h56m to do a complete rotation aren’t we incorrectly shifting the days 4 minutes every day?

Question

Same for the years. If a year actually is 365.24219 days (tropical year) and we’re adding 1 day every 4 years (.25 per year) there’s a difference of 0.00781 days or ~11 minutes per year. After a few years, aren’t we actually shifting hours? Is there a mechanism to adjust it?

In: Physics

Answer 1

23 hours and 56 minutes is how long it takes the earth to revolve around itself relative to the stars. However, during that time earth also moved around the sun, approximately 1/365 of a revolution. Because of this, it takes the Earth approximately 4 more minutes to rotate to the same position relative to the sun.