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
they dont go in a leap day theyre made up by the earths movement around the sun.
take an example:
you have a bare light bulb in the middle of the floor. you move a tennis ball around the lamp the light on it will rotate around it so that once you complete one full rotation the entire ball has seen light. now if the ball starts spinning if it stayed still itd get a light/dark cycle the same as the speed f rotation but as it starts moving around the light source it adds a little bit of the rotation around the light to the same number. the reason the number is so odd (23 hrs and 54 mins) is because we set the length of a day fro which the other units are derrived based off a solar day, not off the rotation of the earth. you could redefine the time span based off the movement of the stars instead of the sun and it would be accurate to the earths rotation then
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