A Day on Earth Lasting for 19 Hours? What a New Mindblowing Study Says
We’ve all been taught in schools that a day on Earth lasts for 24 hours. That’s also equivalent to 1440 minutes. That’s how long it takes for our planet to make a complete rotation around its own axis. But what if our beloved Earth played by different rules in its past?
For a billion years in its distant past, a day on Earth lasted for 5 hours less than in the present – this means that 19 hours was all it took for a single day on our planet. That’s the conclusion of a new study that livescience.com and space.com write about, and it surely confirms once again that our planet was a lot different in its past compared to its current situation.
Blame it on the Moon
Our Moon was to blame for the 19-hour day of the Earth, according to the new study in question. As our natural satellite got farther away from us in the meantime, it allowed for the length of the day to increase as well.
Stephen Meyers, who is one of the co-authors of the new research and also a geoscience professor, explained:
As the moon moves away, the Earth is like a spinning figure skater who slows down as they stretch their arms out,
One of our ambitions was to use astrochronology to tell time in the most distant past, to develop very ancient geological time scales. We want to be able to study rocks that are billions of years old in a way that is comparable to how we study modern geologic processes.
At the present moment, the Moon is located 384,400 kilometers away from us. The distance is constant, and many planets the size of the Earth would fit within that length that separates us from our natural satellite.
The new study was published in Nature Geoscience.
Tommy’s hobby has always been playing video games. He enjoys competing in video games tournaments and writing about his experience. It’s not a big surprise that he mostly covers the latest trends from the gaming industry.
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