Why does earth revolve

Stars rotate. Galaxies rotate it takes million years for the solar system to complete one circuit around the Milky Way, according to NASA.

Some of the fastest things in the universe are dense, whirling objects called pulsars, which are the corpses of massive stars. Some pulsars, which have a diameter about the size of a city, can spin hundreds of times per second. The fastest one, announced in Science in and dubbed Terzan 5ad , rotates times per second. Black holes can be even faster.

But things slow down, too. When the sun formed, it spun once around its axis every four days, Naoz said. But today, it takes about 25 days for the sun to spin once, she said. Its magnetic field interacts with the solar wind to slow its rotation, Naoz said. Even Earth's rotation decelerates. Gravity from the moon pulls on Earth in a way that ever so slightly slows it down. A analysis in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A of ancient eclipses showed that Earth's rotation slowed by 1.

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Share Twit Share Email. August 6, Explore further. Citation : Probing Question: Why does the Earth rotate? This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

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Our Beautiful Universe - Photos and Videos 6 hours ago. Temperature of gas in a cluster 17 hours ago. Maximum mass of a neutron star Nov 09, Related Stories. Probing Question: What are Shooting Stars? Apr 09, Recommended for you. As these atoms glom onto one another with gravity, they need to average out their momentum. Which means, there will be some left over. Like a figure skater pulling in her arms to spin more rapidly, the collapsing proto-Solar System with its averaged out particle momentum began to spin faster and faster.

As the Solar System spun more rapidly, it flattened out into a disk with a bulge in the middle. We see this same structure throughout the Universe: the shape of galaxies, around rapidly spinning black holes, and we even see it in pizza restaurants.

The Sun formed from the bulge at the center of this disk, and the planets formed further out. They inherited their rotation from the overall movement of the Solar System itself. Over the course of a few hundred million years, all of the material in the Solar System gathered together into planets, asteroids, moons and comets.