![]() ![]() Now, every smartphone can get the exact UTC time accurate to 100 billionth of a second from the GPS and other navigation satellites in orbit. Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) UTC is always displayed as a 24-hour clock. When the leap second was created, accurate clocks were the preserve of research laboratories and military installations. ![]() While probably not the best idea even back in the 70s, the leap second has become a progressively worse idea as computers made precision timekeeping more widespread. Between 1972 and now, 27 leap seconds have been inserted into UTC. So, instead of having a regular pattern for adding them, BIMP would tally up all the extra milliseconds and it was necessary, tell everyone to add one whole millisecond to the clock. Leap seconds aren’t needed predictably or very often. UTC is commonly referred to as International Time, Universal Time (UT), Zulu Time. Like leap days, leap seconds would be inserted into the year so as to align Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) with the Earth-tracking Universal Time (UTI). Local time is based on time zone and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). In 1972, BIMP (it comes from the French name, Bureau International des Poids et Mesures) agreed to a simple fix: leap seconds. The extra leap day keeps our calendar roughly aligned with the Earth’s actual rotation. Why do many countries set the clocks back and forth an hour twice a year 12 Months of the Year The 12 months of the year are linked to the Moon’s orbit around Earth. That’s why approximately every fourth year (except for years evenly divisible by 100 but not by 400) is 366 days long. Create a Countdown Timer that counts down in seconds, minutes, hours and days to any date, with time zone support. It actually takes the Earth something like 365.25 days to rotate around the sun. Take years: Each one is 365 days long, right? Well, not quite. Approximate values work well for day-to-day life but aren’t sufficient for scientific measurements or advanced technology. Unfortunately for us humans, the universe is a messy place. The name of a positive leap second is 23:59:60, but digital time formats, which represent the current time as the number of seconds that have elapsed since some origin (NTP, for example), cannot represent that time. Basically, the world’s metrologists (people who study measurement) are crossing their fingers and hoping that someone will come up with a better solution for syncing human timekeeping with nature. Check current local time around the world with our customizable international clock. The Internet Time Service and Leap Seconds For more detailed information about leap seconds, see Leap Seconds FAQs. At a meeting last week in Versailles, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) voted nearly unanimously to abandon the controversial convention in 2035 for at least 100 years. It’s the final countdown for the leap second, a janky way of aligning the atomic clock with the natural variation in the Earth’s rotation-but we’ll get to that. ![]()
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