The moon has gotten further away, resulting in longer days on Earth Gustavo Muniz/Getty
It’s not just you – the days really are getting longer. More than a billion years ago, the moon used to be about 40,000 kilometres closer, which made Earth spin faster. Back then, the days were less than 19 hours long.
Over the course of many thousands of years, Earth’s way of moving through the solar system goes through cyclical changes. The planet’s elliptical orbit shifts around the sun like a hula hoop, and the shape of the orbit itself wobbles between elliptical and nearly…
