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Where does the sun rise first on planet Earth?!

December 6, 2022 2:26 pm

The sun doesn’t stop moving on the horizon, but where does the sun rise first?

The first explanation that comes to mind is that the first region of the earth from the east is the one that receives the sun every morning, but the matter is much more complicated than that.

Physically, there is no earliest sunrise on Earth, says Cameron Holmes, a postdoctoral researcher in astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology, according to Live Science.

Holmes says there is only a series of perpetual dawns that occur in places further out from the west, and it is not true whether there is an earlier or a later dawn.

To keep track of time, humans have devised hypothetical systems for keeping time, such as time zones and the (imaginary) international date line, which tells where one day ends and when the next begins.

Thus, the physicist claims that the first sunrise on the globe theoretically begins according to the international date line.

The International Date Line crosses the center of the Pacific Ocean, precisely along the 180 degree meridian.

Although the international date line is mostly straight, there are some places where it deviates to avoid dividing a country into two time zones or for political and economic reasons.

For example, there is a bulge in this line about 3,200 kilometers east of Kiribati, which is a group of islands that straddle the equator.

In this group, the earliest time period on earth of 14 hours exceeds Universal Time (Greenwich) on most days of the year as the temperate climate, and therefore this region must be the first to welcome the sunrise on the globe, especially Millennium Island or East Caroline Island This group is the one that sees the sun first every morning.

But this doesn’t always happen, as the Earth tilts about 23.5 degrees, so the way the sun’s rays fall on the Earth changes throughout the year.

For example, during the winter solstice on December 21 and 22, the sun rises over the Tropic of Capricorn in the Southern Hemisphere and illuminates most of Antarctica for most hours of the day.

Just above 66.6 degrees south latitude, the sun briefly dips below the horizon before starting to rise several minutes after midnight.

Source: Agencies