• Question: why do we have day and night

    Asked by 374heab47 to Billy, Louise, Naomi, Rachel, Urvashi on 16 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Naomi Green

      Naomi Green answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      Hello 374heab47 🙂

      That is a good question. The Earth is constantly spinning, it takes 24 hours for it to complete one turn. We get our daylight from the sun. As the earth turns half the time the part of Earth we are on faces the sun and we get light so it is day and the other half time we are facing away from the sun so we get no light and it is night. However there is always part of the Earth facing the sun. So when it is night for us people who live on the other side of the world, for example in Australia have day!

      Hope that helps 🙂

    • Photo: Rachel Pallan

      Rachel Pallan answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      Hey 347heab47

      so following on from Naomi…this is why we see the sun during the day. Its essentially a big ball of fire which burns really bright lighting up the earth. However the moon is a planet like our which isn’t burning so without the sun we wouldn’t be able to see the moon. The light off the sun reflects off the moon and bounces back to earth allowing us to see it, which is why there is still a bit of light even in the night.

      Have you ever heard of a total eclipse? This is when the sun moon and earth all come into a line! So from earth the sun is blocked out by the moon and it looks like the moon has a halo, really cool! I think there is one happening soon so you should watch out for it!

    • Photo: Louise France

      Louise France answered on 16 Mar 2015:

      Hey 🙂

      The next solar eclipse is this Friday (20th March) !! Make sure you watch it, as it wont happen again until August 2026!

      They reckon that the UK will experience up to 99 % darkness as the moon passes between the sun and the earth, casting a shadow over earth’s surface.

      It will happen around 9.30 am ish…give or take a few mins. Remember to never look directly at the sun though – you can either project the eclipse onto a piece of paper, or get yourself some of those funky free glasses that are being given away!

      Happy eclipse-watching 🙂

    • Photo: Billy Hicks

      Billy Hicks answered on 17 Mar 2015:

      Naomi has given a great answer for this question, but did you know that the earth is on a slight tilt? The earth also rotates around the sun while it is spinning. It takes one year to complete one lap of the sun. Because of the tilt, part of the time we will get more sunlight than we will do at other times of the rotation around the sun. We see this as the seasons, so when it’s summer we are tilted towards the sun slightly so more time of the day is in sunlight.

      Because of the tilt, the north pole will have sunlight for the whole of the day. There isn’t any darkness for months! But it’s the opposite during the winter, there isn’t any sunlight from October to March!

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