The Earth is slowing down its rotation as the gravitational link with the Moon is gradually weakening.
New research has shown that days on Earth are gradually getting longer as the Moon is gradually moving away from our planet.
About this writing Daily Mail.
Scientists have discovered that as the moon moves away, its influence on the Earth weakens. As a result, the rotation of the planet slows down, and the length of the day increases gradually.
According to calculations, a day on our planet will last 25 hours, but this will take about 200 million years.
“As the Moon moves away, the Earth becomes like a spinning skate that slows down by extending its arms,” explained University of Wisconsin geologist Stephen Meyers.
The Moon is now about 384,400 kilometers away from our planet, orbiting the Earth once every 27.3 days. Every year our satellite moves away by about 3.8 cm, which means that it takes a little more time to complete a revolution around our planet each time.
At some point, the moon will reach a constant speed and will only be visible from one side of our planet, scientists say.
Meyers and his colleagues reconstructed the deep history of the relationship between the Earth and the Moon and found that the Moon was closer to our planet 1.4 billion years ago and that the Earth was spin faster. Therefore, the earth’s day lasted only 18 hours.
However, over millions of years, the moon moved further and further away from Earth. Scientists call this process “the decline of the moon.”
It was possible to accurately measure the distance of the moon’s removal from the Earth after the astronauts of the Apollo missions placed special reflections on the Moon for laser beams sent from the Earth to the surface of the moon.
In addition to the moon’s gravity, other factors, including climate change, also affect the speed of the Earth’s rotation.
As global temperatures rise, polar ice caps are melting and sea levels are rising. Gradually all this liquid water will move from the Earth’s poles to the equator. This caused the Earth to become even wider in the middle and its circumference to slow down even more.
All this means that the days of the Earth are getting longer. The changes are so small that we don’t notice them. But over millions of years, these fractions of a second add up, and eventually add a full hour to the length of Earth’s day.
Let us remind you that scientists find an Earth-like planetwhich will soon be destroyed. The discovery of this planet challenged current understanding of the structure of planetary systems.
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2024-08-17 18:12:29
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