Why does an earth year equal 24 hrs?

Answer 1

The division of day and night began with the Babylonians and Egyptians, who divided the day and night into 12 equal parts, probably to coincide with the movements of constellations (or the observed number of lunar cycles per year). Because day and night are only equally long at the equator, this would create hours of unequal length. So the 24 hour system, with varying times for sunrise and sunset, was eventually adopted.

The Greeks divided the year into 12 months, to coincide with the 12 observed lunar cycles in a calendar year.

Answer 2

24 is an arbitrary number chosen primarily because it has many factors. The number of factors permits the day to be divided into equal measures of two, three, four, six, twelve, and 24, respectively.

Whoever chose 24 might have as easily selected 36 hours, which also has lots of factors, and is 1/10th of a circle. There was probably some numerological significance to 24.

My guess is that 24 is closer to 27, which is about the number of days in a lunar month.

Answer 3

This is due to the fact that the earth rotates and it takes nearly 24 hours for the earth to compete 1 rotation.

It actually takes exactly 24 hours on average for the Earth to make one rotation with respect to the sun by definition (it's off very slightly for most individual days, because the Earth doesn't move at constant speed in its orbit).

Answer 4

The "24 hours" existed before the "day" did, as this (about 24 hours) is the time it takes for the earth to make one complete revolution on its axis. We came to call this period of time a day.

Answer 5

The time it takes for the earth to rotate once was broken into 24 parts.

This was done before people understood or knew about fractions. 24 was chosen because it was a convenient number with several factors. This was also the case when choosing minutes and seconds as subdivisions of an hour.

Answer 6

The day is actually made of 23hours and 56minutes. It is that way because the earth takes hat amount of time to spin around itself once.

Answer 7

Because that is how we defined a day, as 24 hours.

Answer 8

there are 24 hours in a day because there is. live with it bum

well really there is because it takes 24 hrs. to spin in a complete circle and i think im smarter than you. HAHA and HA!

Answer 9

An Earth Day is 24, based on revolution of Earth and year based on orbit around Sun, but is not precise to the second which is why we have leap years every few years.

Answer 10

Yes