The Day Is Getting Longer, Not Just Because It’s Only Tuesday

If your day seems like it’s getting longer and just dragging on forever, you’re half-right – and we’ll explain the rest.

By DAVID on June 26, 2018
(Photo by Three Lions/Getty Images)

It’s Tuesday, you’re sitting at your desk at work (or hiding in the bathroom, we won’t tell anyone), and you’re watching the clock tick by. The day is dragging on, and on, and it’s only Tuesday. It feels like Monday Junior. “There must be extra time today. It’s a conspiracy everyone else is in on,” you say to yourself. Well, you’re half right. The days really are getting longer. We’ll explain.

So, the earth is round (sorry, flat-earthers), and the moon is round. These round balls of stone are floating somewhere within our great big universe. Problem is, as these balls are floating, they’re spinning, orbiting, and falling farther away from one another. Yes, the moon is getting further away from the earth. As the moon gets farther away from the earth, the rotation of the earth on its axis slows down. It spins more slowly, which causes the length of a day to become longer. This means more daylight, more night time. What isn’t changing is how we measure time though. So, good news, your workday isn’t actually getting longer, so that’s more free time.

However, it’s not happening very fast. And you wouldn’t notice any change for quite some time, of course. The length of a day is only being extended by about 1.8 milliseconds, per century. Yeah, at the end of the next 100 years, the length of time in a day will be almost 2 milliseconds longer. To put that into perspective, a fly can flap its wings just once every 3 milliseconds. Distance from the earth to the moon is about ~239,000 miles, and gets about 38 millimetres farther from us every year. That’s a difference of just 12-and-a-half feet at the end of that 100 years. To read more about it, check out the info here.

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