Earth could have 25 hours a day. Here's why

We all have the same 24 hours in a day.

However, this is going to change in future.

Scientists say the length of a day on Earth could extend to 25 hours as the Moon is moving away from the planet.

The development is also likely to change the relationship between the planet and its only natural satellite.

25 hours in a day

The drifting of the Moon has been impacting the length of days on Earth, albeit very slowly, according to scientists.

Currently, the Moon’s average distance from Earth is 384,400 kilometres (238,855 miles). An orbit around the Earth takes almost a month, or 27.3 days, to complete.

In a study, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined the formation of rocks 90 million years ago.

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The team also examined Earth’s interactions with the Moon approximately 1.4 billion years ago in this research. The geophysical features of the Earth today are shaped in part by these ancient interactions, as per Business Today.

The Moon turns out to be moving 3.82 centimetres away from Earth annually. After 200 million years, this will cause Earth days to gradually increase to 25 hours.

According to their findings, the rate of recession of the Moon is rather consistent at the moment, but it has varied throughout geological timescales because of several factors, such as continental drift and the speed at which the Earth rotates.

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The phenomenon behind the drifting

The main cause of this phenomenon is thought to be the tidal forces that are generated by the Earth and Moon’s gravitational interactions with one another.

Stephen Meyers, a geoscience professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of the study, used the example of a figure skater to describe the occurrence.

She said, “As the moon moves away, the Earth is like a spinning figure skater who slows down as they stretch their arms out.” Like a figure skater, Earth also slows its rotation as the Moon moves away.

“One of our ambitions was to use astrochronology to tell time in the most distant past, to develop very ancient geological time scales,” he added.

“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,” Meyers said.

Another professor, who studies the relationship between the Moon and the Earth, explains how it’s all about tides. “The tidal drag on the Earth slows its rotation down and the Moon gains that energy as angular momentum,” David Waltham, a professor of geophysics at Royal Holloway, University of London, told Bloomberg.

Moon has an atmosphere

Meanwhile, in a similar new study about the Moon, the NASA astronauts who became the first people to land on the  moon’s surface in the 1960s and 1970s, have discovered a previously unknown lunar characteristic - it has an atmosphere, though quite tenuous.

Soil samples they retrieved are now revealing the main physical process driving this atmosphere, as per Reuters.

By analysing which forms of two elements - potassium and rubidium - were present in nine tiny soil samples from five Apollo missions, researchers determined that the lunar atmosphere was created and is sustained primarily by the effects of meteorites, large and small, striking the  moon’s surface.

“Meteorite impacts generate high temperatures ranging from 2,000-6,000 degrees Celsius (3,600-10,800 degrees Fahrenheit). These extreme temperatures melt and vaporize rocks on the lunar surface, similar to how heat vaporises water, releasing atoms into the atmosphere,” said Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) planetary scientist and cosmochemist Nicole Nie, lead author of the study published on Friday in the journal Science Advances.

The lunar atmosphere is extremely thin and technically classified as an exosphere, meaning atoms do not collide with each other because their numbers are so sparse, in contrast to Earth’s thick and stable atmosphere.

“The Apollo missions carried instruments to the lunar surface which detected atoms in the air,” Nie said.

The  moon  has been constantly bombarded by meteorites - early in its history by large ones that gashed the gaping craters visible on the lunar surface and more recently by smaller ones including dust-sized micrometeorites.

Some of the atoms lofted by these impacts fly off into space. The rest remain suspended above the surface in an atmosphere regularly replenished as more meteorites land.

“Many important questions about the lunar atmosphere remain unanswered. We are now able to address some of these questions due to advancements in technology,” Nie said, adding, “When Apollo samples were returned from the  moon  in the 1970s, the isotopic compositions of potassium and rubidium in lunar soils were measured using mass spectrometers. However, at that time, no isotopic differences were observed. Today’s mass spectrometers offer much greater precision.”

With inputs from Reuters