Can you tell me why...?

Question

Why does the earth rotate...??
And why particularly from east to west and not from west to east..??

Answer 1

Our solar system- the Sun, planets, Kuiper belt and Oort cloud, everything orbiting the sun even many times further than the orbit of Pluto- is thought to have condensed from a vast cloud of interstellar gas some billions of years ago when that cloud was shocked or squeezed by a supernova explosion. The dust and grains that condensed out of the cooling solar gas aggregated to form larger fragments of rock. Chondritic meteorites are basically just such collections of grains and fragments that have been compacted together to form a larger piece of rock and eventually small planetary bodies. Such bodies are termed planetesimals when they become roughly as large as asteroids (several kilometres to a few hundred kilometres in dimension). The larger they grow, the greater the gravitational attraction that the planetesimals exert and hence the more effectively they sweep up additional particles and rock fragments while circling the Sun. (Britannica CD)

Because that initial shockwave came from a particular direction and because the cloud was not of uniform density, the particles had a net rotation around their center of gravity. Humans subsequently identified that direction as "counterclockwise as viewed from above the north pole of the sun". As the bodies of the solar system grew by accretion, particles swept up from different distances from the center of gravity (the sun) had different orbital velocities. Analogously, water swirling down a drain moves slower further and faster closer to the center.

Galileo and Newton showed that rotational energy is conserved: The sun and planets ‘inherited' their spin from the orbits of their constituent particles, so to speak. Today, some five billion years later, all that rotational energy is still conserved in the rotations and revolutions of the bodies of the solar system. Our solar system is not unchanging, though. Because of gravitational interactions between moons and their planets, between the planets, meteors and comets themselves and interactions between the solar wind and the magnetospheres of the planets, rotational energy is still be ‘traded' back and forth: Mercury orbits in a 3:2 resonance with its rotation, our day is getting longer while the moon only shows one face towards us, the rings of the gas giants are temporary phenomena,... But that's another story.

Answer 2

Conservation of angular momentum. Hmmm...how to explain...

Big cloud of gas swirling around in space

Big cloud starts collapsing under own gravity

A slight imbalance in the direction the gas circulates in leads to a slight rotation in one direction or another as the cloud collapses.

The cloud shrinks even further and spins faster, just like a skater spins faster by pulling her extended arms in towards her body.

The cloud begins to form a central star and outlying planets, the star and planets all carry some of the momentum from the original spin.

The spin was essentially a coin toss, it had to go one way or another.

East and west are arbitrary distinctions that are a result of people from the western edge of the northern hemisphere applying their geographic perspective inappropriately. Seen from the southern pole the planet would appear to spin in the opposite direction of the north polar view.

Answer 3

I thought it spun west to east.

Answer 4

Pl. let me know once you got answer. But sure this question has never crossed my mind

Answer 5

good question, e v e n t the scientist will not know for sure.

Answer 6

Happens that God is right handed!!

Answer 7

the sun pulls it that way why?