From our perspective on Earth, we see the Sun as the source of all energy for the Earth. We call this source the solar system's central star. Our planet rotates about the sun once every 24 hours. This is called an equatorial orbit.
From the side, however, things are different. For example, if you were here during nighttime when the Sun was very low on the horizon, you would think that this "sunlight" was coming from the opposite direction. In reality, there isn't any sunlight entering our atmosphere from the opposite direction. Instead, these rays of light from the Sun are bending around us, causing what appears to be the Sun rising. The same thing happens with the Moon; you cannot actually see the moon rise when looking towards it. It seems to be rising due to reflection off the surface of the oceans.
The Earth, therefore, rotates and spins to stay in place. But there's also the added bonus of creating seasons and tides from the moon.
Because the earth's surface is tilted 23 degrees away from the plane of the solar system, the north pole points directly away from the sun while the south pole faces towards it. This causes the Northern Hemisphere to receive more direct solar radiation, resulting in the northern continents warming faster than those in the Southern Hemispheres. However, because the poles never fully lose their winter/summer distinction, they continue to change polarity for thousands of years.
If you had visited the world prior to humans ever discovering it, you would've seen that the landmasses didn't even exist. They were just clouds of rotating material swirling down to form the proto-planetary disc. There wasn't a central object like the sun but rather a vast cloud of dust. Some astronomers believe that this cloud of dust is still intact and orbiting around the black hole at the center of our galaxy. Scientists have been trying to find evidence of this theory since the 1980s, using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The results of those attempts were inconclusive.
A new discovery shows that our solar system originated as one giant planet, not several. The researchers used data from ALMA, which stands for Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array. With this instrument, scientists can observe extremely small amounts of cosmic energy — in this case, radio waves that are emitted from distant stars. There's still a long way to go with this theory, but it's an interesting start