Susan Santa, age 7, of Seattle, Washington for her question:
What makes the sun go down?
A great lighthouse sends out its cheering beams across the dark ocean. Homecoming sailors guide their ships by it, keeping the bright beacon in view. Outgoing sailors turn their backs on the light and travel towards the dark ocean. On land, we can see a faraway light through the darkness only while we are facing it. When we turn our backs on it, it seems to disappear.
The same thing is true of daylight and darkness. Our earth is a great ball, spinning around like a top in the sky. The sun is a far bigger ball, made of fire and light, about 93 million miles away from our earth. As the earth turns, sometimes one side, sometimes another side is facing the glowing sun. The opposite side faces away from the sun into the darkness.
When our side of the earth faces the sun, we are bathed in its rays of daylight. The opposite side of our round earth is then facing away from the sun into the dark, starry night.
But the spinning earth is never still every second it races around in an easterly direction. Our side of the earth is forever swinging over to greet a new view of the eastern sky, no sooner have we glimpsed the sun peeping above the eastern skyline than the earth has moved on and a bigger slice of the sun comes into view.
The sun is rising, we say. And so it seems. So it seemed to the early people who did not know that the earth was a spinning ball.
They thought that the sun moved around the earth. It's plain as the nose on your face, they said, the sun comes up in the east, travels over the sky and sinks in the west. And it was a very hard fob to convince these people that this was not exactly true,
Nowadays we know better. we know that we ride our earth like a merry go round. Round we go on the carousel till we catch a glimpse of the ferris wheel. The ferris wheel looks as if it is waltzing around to face us and then hides out of view on the other side. If we didnt know better, we might well believe that the ferric wheel was chasing circles around us. but we know that it is standing still, coming into view only as we spin and turn around.
The rising sun plays the same trick on us. It seems to ro around our earth, while actually we are spinning around and around to face it with first one side, then another.