Earth's Rotations

Did you know why the Sun rises from the east and sets in the west daily? It’s not the Sun that moves. It’s Earth spinning on its axis.

Earth’s axis is an imaginary line that runs from the North Pole to the South Pole.

This spinning motion, called rotation, takes 24 hours to complete, giving us day and night.

But there’s more to Earth’s rotation. Its axis is not straight up and down but tilted at 23.5 degrees relative to an imaginary flat plane called the ecliptic, where Earth revolves around the Sun.

This tilt causes different regions of Earth to receive varying amounts of sunlight as it orbits the Sun. This is why we experience summer when a hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun and winter when it’s tilted away.

Since Earth rotates eastward, the Sun, Moon, and stars appear to move across the sky in the opposite direction, from east to west.

Without Earth’s rotation, one side would become too hot to support life, while the other would be frozen.