• Question: Why does a year have 365 days and a day of 24 hours?

    Asked by Sammy to Hayley, Jimi on 18 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Hayley Moulding

      Hayley Moulding answered on 18 Mar 2016:

      Good question Sammy. It is all to do with how long the Earth takes to go around the Sun. The earth actually takes approximately 365.25 days to go around the Sun, but we only have 365 days a year. Like in 2016 though, we had an extra day didn’t we in February? It is a leap year! This extra day that happens every 4 years helps to add the extra day in to make up for the missing 4 quarters (0.25 x 4) which we needs to circle the Sun! The day is 24 hours because of very complicated reasons that the Egyptians made up! Those Egyptians!! They divided the day into 10 hours and added ‘twilight hour’ at the beginning and the end of the day-time period. They said night-time can be 12 hours long based on the starts they saw!

    • Photo: Jimi Wills

      Jimi Wills answered on 18 Mar 2016:

      On Earth a year is 365 and a quarter days. On other planets it’s different, because they take a different amount of time to go around the sun.

      As hayley said, the clock comes from the olden days… but there have been recent attempts to decimalise clocks!

      Decimal time is when a day is split into only 10 hours, each hour has 100 minutes and each minute has 100 seconds.

      A decimal hours 2.4 normal hours
      A decimal minute is 1.44 normal minutes
      and a decimal second is 0.864 normal seconds

      … weird!

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