Where do those extra four minutes go every day?

Question

The Earth fully rotates in 23 hours and 56 minutes. Where do those extra four minutes go??

I know the answer is supposedly leap day, but I still don’t understand it from a daily time perspective.

I have to be up early for my job, which right now sucks because it’s dark out that early. So every day I’ve been checking my weather app to see when the sun is going to rise, and every day its a minute or two earlier because we’re coming out of winter. But how the heck does that work if there’s a missing four minutes every night?? Shouldn’t the sun be rising even earlier, or later? And how does it not add up to the point where noon is nighttime??

It hurts my head so much please help me understand.

In: Earth Science

Answer 1

Ok putting together some of these responses, I think the main idea is that we don’t define 24 hours as the time it takes for the earth to spin exactly 360 degrees, but instead as the time it takes for the sun to re-appear in the closest position in the sky from one day to the next. Therefore the 4 minute time difference is irrelevant to daily timekeeping with respect to the sun. (?)