Why does Earth spin?
Earth's Billion-Year Twirl
Why does Earth spin?
Everything spins. Your ceiling fan. A pizza chef's dough. Hurricanes. Galaxies. And Earth — our whole planet — spins once every 24 hours, which is why you get morning, noon, night, and then morning again. But why does it spin? Why doesn't it just sit still in space like a parked car?
The answer lives 4.6 billion years ago, when Earth didn't exist yet. Back then, our corner of space was just a giant spinning cloud of gas and dust — leftovers from older stars that had exploded. The cloud spun slowly, the way bathwater swirls down a drain, because everything in it was drifting in slightly different directions and those motions averaged out into one big lazy rotation.
