5 ms·
I have no idea how often leap seconds occur, but if we were to say that there should be one leap second every year and we instead ignored them, it would take 43
by Zikes 11y ago
I have no idea how often leap seconds occur, but if we were to say that there should be one leap second every year and we instead ignored them, it would take 43,200 years before that happened.
It would take 60 years of skipping yearly leap seconds before we saw even a 1 minute offset.
- tfinniga 11y agoWikipedia says that we've had 26 leap seconds since 1972, or about 0.6 seconds per year.
- joshyeager 11y agoSome leap seconds are negative, so the total change since 1972 is less than 26 seconds.
- ubernostrum 11y agoTAI (weighted average of atomic clocks, correcting for relativistic effects due to altitude) is the basis for UTC, and is currently 35 seconds ahead of UTC. Prior to 1972, UTC and TAI used different definitions of a second (UTC used a definition based on positions of celestial bodies while TAI used a definition based on the hyperfine transition of cesium, and the two were periodically manually "stepped" back into sync). As of 1972 they use the same definition of the second (TAI's definition, which is also the SI definition), and a final "step" was applied to cause the difference in the two times to be an integer number of TAI seconds. That created an offset of 10 seconds, which has since grown with the addition of 25 (and soon to be 26) positive and zero negative leap seconds to UTC.
- gpvos 11y agoThe rotation of the Earth is slowing down, and this slowing down is expected to accelerate in the future. So in several thousand years, we will need multiple leap seconds per day to keep up. Whether we should take this into account now is the question, though.
- tzs 11y ago> [...] it would take 43,200 years before that happened. That's how long for noon to end up at midnight. Noon would occur at night after only around 22000 years (I'm being fuzzy because people may not all agree on what night means).