Because the Earth’s rotation (which happens roughly once every 24 hours) is slowing down at an irregular rate, these leap seconds are needed to keep the atomic clocks and our days correctly lined up.
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If we let all of those fractions of seconds pile up day after day and year after year, our standard of time would stop keeping in sync with the actual behavior of the planet. UTC is “atomic time” – the duration of one second is based on extremely predictable electromagnetic transitions in atoms of cesium.
That year, scientists had to add 10 seconds to the world’s astronomical clocks in one go.
NASA scientists further explained that solar day hasn’t been 86,400 seconds long since the year 1820.
This happens because the Earth is in the middle of a gravitational struggle – a sort of braking force – with the Sun and the Moon, causing it to gradually slow down its rotation. The fastest of them has the ability to react in millionths of a second.
One would argue 2 milliseconds – less than the time it takes you to blink – is not something that needs to be measured and kept account of. Tomorrow’s leap second will be added at 23:59:60, Coordinated Universal Time (7:59 PM ET).
“With the Leap Second approaching, I was challenged by Beagle Street to make a film celebrating life and making the most of our time”, he said. Plenty of other factors are involved in the day’s length, but the atmosphere is one of the most important.
About 10 per cent of large-scale computer networks will encounter hiccups due to the leap second, said Geoff Chester, public affairs officer for the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, which keeps time for the world’s biggest military.
On a normal day, the clock moves from 23:59:59 to 00:00:00 the next day. Technically, computerised clocks should read 09:59:60 to accommodate the extra second. In January, the agency advised that a leap second should be introduced into the UTC in June.
Markets around the globe are frantically trying to avoid a leap second that threatens to disrupt global trading on Tuesday.
For the first time, a leap second was added in 1972 and since then 25 leap seconds have been added.
In November, members of the worldwide Telecommunication Union will meet like they do every three years and vote whether to retain the leap second.
According to Wouters, the choice of June 30 is just convention. But some groups have been looking to get rid of leap seconds. But most systems just turn off for that one second, NASA said. (Before 1972, adjustments were made in a different way.).
Other events on Earth like significant earthquakes can affect its movement. The quasars serve as reference points that are essentially motionless because they are located billions of light years from Earth.
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This seemingly arbitrary gain in time comes from the earth’s need to stay aligned with the planet’s orbit. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center helps this endeavor by providing coordination, analyzation and data collection services to the VLBI. As stated at the beginning of this article, when the leap second was added in 2012, Reddit, Gawker and Mozilla all crashed.
