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

    Asked by meg123 to Amy, Karen, Sarah, Vijay, Will on 19 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by nilokoko, niamhcarr, josieb123.
    • Photo: Sarah Martin

      Sarah Martin answered on 19 Jun 2012:

      Hi meg! The division of a day into 24 hours is arbitrary – there is no physical reason why it should be 24, it just seemed like a good number at the time. However Earth rotates around itself 364.25 times on one orbit around the sun – the rotation around itself is a day, and the rotation around the sun a year. So the way we’ve divided it up is to have 3 years with 364 days and then one leap year with 365, to make up the quarter year.

      🙂 Sarah

    • Photo: Karen Reed

      Karen Reed answered on 19 Jun 2012:

      Hiya Meg,
      Sarah’s already given a great answer but related to this, this is an explaination of what a second is

      http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009z399

      Check it out

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