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
It has nothing to do with a leap day.
The earth takes about 23 hours and 56 minutes to turn around once on its axis in respect to the stars around us, but in that time the earth also moves forward in its orbit around the sun by about one degree.
Basically after the Earth turns once around its axis, the sun is no longer where it was before and the Earth has to turn a tiny bit (about 4 minutes) more to be in the same position it was in respect to the Sun.
Over the course of a year those 4 minutes add up to about one day.
Basically the earth turns around its axis 366 times a year but thanks to the fact that we also obit around the sun once we only get 365 days per year.
If you count days by the rising and setting of a star you will get one more day than if you counted days by the rising and setting of the sun.
The whole leap year thing is a completely different thing.
It comes from the fact that an orbit around the sun does not take exactly 365 days (as i pretended above) but more like 365 and a quarter days.
The length of the year is not a whole number of days. We take the quarter days that are left over each year and then when we have enough for a whole day we add a February 29th. This is sort of every 4th year.
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