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Most of us wish we had more than 24 hours in a day to get everything done and actually breathe. What if each day gave us more than double that time? If it wasn’t for a phenomenon that put the lengthening of Earth’s days on pause billions of years ago, that would have probably happened.
Earth has not always had 24-hour days. There were fewer than 10 hours in a day when the Moon first came into being around 4.5 billion years ago, but they have grown longer as lunar tidal forces gradually slowed Earth’s rotation. But there was a long period when days didn’t grow at all. Astrophysicists have now found that, from 2 billion to 600 million years ago, days were about 19.5 hours because several tidal forces canceled each other out and kept Earth rotating at the same speed for over a billion years. If that had never happened, our present days might be over 65 hours long.
“The fact that the day is 24 hours long…is not a coincidence,” the research team said in a study recently published in Science Advances.
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