Our planet Earth has every snippet of ingredients to satisfy every human’s needs and wants. He or she eats food, drinks water, breathes oxygen, lives in home. Humans depend on the real-time system to go about their business. Earth is rotating 24 hours (23 hours 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds to be precise).
But a new study suggests that the days on Earth are getting a tad longer due to moon’s movement. Interestingly, we might soon have 25 hours in a day. Yes, you read that right! According to the Geoscientists, who are more into studying the effect of moon’s distance from Earth on the length of a day, Earth is expected to have 25 hours in a day in near future.
Researchers tell that, about 1.4 billions of years ago, Earth used to have 18 hours and 41 minutes in a day because the moon was much closer to the Earth. During that time, there was an slight alteration in Earth’s rotation on its own axis.
When the moon started to move away from the Earth, the 18-hour long days turned to 24-hour long days. It is cognisance of the fact that the length of a day is measured by the distance of the moon from Earth. The farther the moon goes, the longer the days become.
For so many years, the researchers have been tracking the history of the solar system. They used a statistical method, called astrochronology ‘to look back on Earth’s geologic past, reconstruct the history of the solar system and understand ancient climate change as captured in the rock record.’
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have recently published a new study that tells that the moon will continue to drift away from the Earth and the days will get longer in the times to come.
Stephen Meyers who is the professor of Geoscience at the University Wisconsin-Madison, explains, “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 timescales. 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.”
The study finds that the moon is moving away from the Earth at the rate of 3.82 centimetres per year. If this scientific calculation was to put it back, then beyond 1.5 billion years ago, the moon would have been closer to the Earth that its gravitational forces with our planet would have ripped the moon apart. But, we are well aware that the moon is 4.5 billion years old.
