Why Does the Earth Rotate? Causes and Explanations

KOMPAS.com – Every day, the Earth rotates once on its axis or is often known as rotation.

The Earth’s rotation, which rotates on its axis, allows our planet to enjoy the sunrises and sunsets that characterize everyday life on Earth. Earth’s rotation has occurred since 4.6 billion years ago and will continue until the world ends.

However, why does the Earth rotate?

Cause the Earth rotates

Quoted from Live Science, Wednesday (16/8/2023) Earth was formed from a disc of gas and dust that revolved around the newborn sun.

In this rotating disc, bits of dust and rock stuck together to form the Earth.

“As it grows, the space rock continues to collide with the nascent planet, exerting forces that make it spin,” explains Smadar Naoz, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Also read: New Theory Explains How Planet Earth Formed

Because all of the debris in the early Solar System revolved around the Sun in roughly the same direction, the collision also spun the Earth and nearly everything else in the Solar System in the same direction.

Today, however, some planets have put their own spin on the motion.

Venus rotates in the opposite direction to Earth, and Uranus’s axis is tilted 90 degrees. Scientists aren’t sure how these planets got to be like this, but they have a few theories.

For the planet Venus, perhaps the collision caused its rotation to be reversed.

Or maybe initially Venus started to rotate like the other planets, but over time the Sun’s gravitational pull on Venus’ thick clouds combined with friction between the planet’s core and mantle caused the spin to reverse.

Meanwhile on Uranus, scientists think there was a major collision that made the direction of the planet’s spin reversed.

Also read: Discovery of a Super Planet Earth Orbiting a Dwarf Star

A rotating extraterrestrial object

Regardless of all that, everything in space will rotate.

“Spinning is a fundamental behavior of objects in the universe,” said Naoz.

For example, asteroids, stars, and galaxies also rotate.

Some of the fastest objects in the universe are solid, rotating objects, called pulsars.

Some pulsars can rotate hundreds of times per second. The fastest one is dubbed Terzan 5ad, spinning 716 times per second.

Also read: Astronomers Discover 2 Super-Earth Planets Orbiting Their Stars, Potentially Livable?

Black holes can go even faster. The black hole, called GRS 1915+105, may be rotating between 920 and 1,150 times per second, a 2006 study in the Astrophysical Journal found.

But things are also slowing down. When the Sun formed, it rotated once on its axis every four days.

While today it takes about 25 days for the Sun to rotate once.

Including the Earth’s rotation is slowing down. Gravity from the Moon pulls on Earth and makes it slow down.

A 2016 analysis in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A of ancient eclipses showed that Earth’s rotation slowed by 1.78 milliseconds over a century.

Also read: Super Earth Planet in Red Dwarf Habitable Zone Detected, Like What?

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2023-08-17 01:00:00
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