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what makes the earth spin

Earth keeps spinning because it was “born” spinning from a rotating cloud of gas and dust, and in space there’s almost nothing to slow it down, so its spin is conserved.

How Earth Got Its Spin

  • About 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system formed from a giant, slowly rotating cloud of gas and dust called the solar nebula.
  • As gravity pulled this cloud inward, it spun faster and flattened into a disk, and the clumps of material that became planets inherited that rotation.
  • Earth formed inside this spinning disk, so the growing planet naturally ended up rotating as the material stuck together.

Why Earth Keeps Spinning

  • In space, there is very little friction, so once a planet is spinning, it tends to keep spinning because of inertia and conservation of angular momentum.
  • Earth will keep rotating for billions of years, gradually slowing mainly due to tidal interactions with the Moon, which lengthen the day by a tiny fraction of a second per century.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.