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Mystery #1Tier 1earth & space / time

Why is a day exactly one day long, and where does that length come from?

Every morning the Sun climbs up one side of the world, and every evening it slips down the other. Then, like clockwork, the whole thing happens all over again. Something is keeping perfect time, over and over, without a single battery. What is actually setting the length of a day?

A long-exposure night photograph in which the stars have drawn concentric arcs across the sky above a dark wooded hill, tracing the Earth's turn.
Photo: Navneet Sharma · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Your guess

What do you think decides how long one day lasts?

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