A Leap Second Will Be Added To The 31st Night Of 2016
For those who are preparing themselves for the 31st night celebration, wanting to welcome New year 2017, here’s a bad news for them. The 31st night will be One-second longer.
This extra One second is described as a leap second by International timekeepers. It is just like the extra day of Feb, 29 in a leap year but the reason is kinda different. Earth’s rotation is slightly getting slower which affects the global time. Main key factor for slowing down the Earth’s rotation is the gravitational Earth-braking forces by the Moon, that gives high rise to ocean tides.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defined a “second” as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of radiation of the caesium-133 atom. It was declared in October 1967 at the 13th General Conference on Weights and Measures according to the report by washingtonpost.
The Paris Observatory explained in a statement,“This extra second, or leap second, makes it possible to align astronomical time, which is irregular and determined by Earth’s rotation, with UTC which is extremely stable and has been determined by atomic clocks since 1967”.
Planet Earth decelerates by 2 milliseconds in a day per 10 years, announced by US Naval Observatory. This fine time gap was caught on the atomic clock which is the most accurate clock on Earth till date. So back in 1972 keeping those things in mind 10 seconds were already added to the global time which is also known as Coordinated Universal Time(UTC), Greenwich. Since then, 1 second used to be added at every 500 days. As per the report of dailymail, the last leap second was inserted on June 30, 2015.
Countries under UTC zones will experience the 61st second on the clock as 23:59:60 before 00:00:00. Those countries which follow EST(Eastern Standard Time) will get the extra second at 18:59:60. This leap second will be the 27th leap second since 1972. To accommodate with UTC Google will run a linear smear on their server clock. During this period, all Google server clock will run 13.9 microseconds slower for each second. That means each second of the server clock will be calculated as, 1 sec = (1 sec + 13.9 µ secs).
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