'Leap Second' Will Make New Year's Eve Just a Little Bit Longer

A "leap second" can be added to the world's official clocks on Dec. 31, 2016, to accommodate Earth's step by step slowing rotation.

Credit score: NASA

For one tiny heartbeat on the stroke of midnight on New 12 months's Eve, a minute can be 61 seconds lengthy.

World clocks will formally add a "leap second" at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Common Time (UTC), which is the time commonplace set by extremely exact atomic clocks. These official clocks, which set the time commonplace for the world, will shift to 23 hours, 59 minutes and 60 seconds earlier than turning to midnight on Jan. 1.

The additional second of get together time is designed to reconcile two methods of conserving time: atomic clocks, and clocks based mostly on the Earth's rotation. [5 of the Most Precise Clocks Ever Made]

"Earth is slowing down over geological time, and that may result in an issue once you've bought a ton of clocks," Demetrios Matsakis, chief scientist on the U.S. Naval Observatory's Time Service Division,  advised Reside Science final 12 months. "What do you do when the day will get longer?"

Traditionally, time was held on the rotation of the Earth in relation to far-flung celestial objects. Nonetheless, the moon's tug on the Earth slows the planet's spin.

Prior to now century, nevertheless, scientists have shifted to utilizing extremely exact atomic clocks to depend the ticking of the seconds. These atomic clocks, which are sometimes pegged to the vibration of atoms, are so frighteningly exact that they could not lose a second over your complete age of the universe. The present official atomic clock for the US bases the second on the vibrational frequency of the cesium atom.

Because of this, each day, the rotation-based time loses between 1.5 and a couple of milliseconds relative to the atomic clock. That provides as much as a full second each 500 to 750 days, Reside Science beforehand reported.

To maintain these two forms of time in sync, in 1972, the Worldwide Earth Rotation and Reference Methods Service (IERS), which retains time for the world, has snuck 26 leap seconds into atomic clock time. The earlier bonus second was added on June 30, 2015.

These leap seconds are all the time added on both June 30 or Dec. 31, in response to the IERS.

Initially revealed on Reside Science.

Tweet