If the Earth actually takes 23h56m to do a complete rotation aren’t we incorrectly shifting the days 4 minutes every day?

Question

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

Answer 1

Um. Yes…. this is what Leap Years are for. Every 4 years we add an extra day, February 29.

edit: Except there’s some junk about having to leave a few leap years every hundred out otherwise we’d end up out of synch that way too. So we skip like 3 every few hundred or something. There’s a formula for it.