Same for the years. If a year actually is 365.24219 days (tropical year) and we’re adding 1 day every 4 years (.25 per year) there’s a difference of 0.00781 days or ~11 minutes per year. After a few years, aren’t we actually shifting hours? Is there a mechanism to adjust it?
In: Physics
> If a year actually is 365.24219 days (tropical year) and we’re adding 1 day every 4 years (.25 per year) there’s a difference of 0.00781 days or ~11 minutes per year
Yes, which is why every 100 years we don’t add a year on the leap year. So 1800 and 1900 weren’t leap years. But that means we aren’t adding enough days, so every 1000 years we don’t skip leap year, so 2000 was a leap year.
After that I think it is every 50,000 years you do need to skip the leap year on the 1,000. So the year 50,000 will not be a leap year, even it is a 4 year to be a leap year, and a 100 to be a skipped leap year, and a 1,000 to be an unobserved skip of a leap year. We will skip it.
Really what it comes down to is that the rotation of the Earth (length of a day) has nothing do to with the orbit of the Earth (length of a year). So we have weird clocks and calendars to try to compensate.
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