It is called a leap second and will not be added this year to our calendar. But don’t worry, it’s just a way of calculating changes in Earth’s speed that we don’t need this year. here because of
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Nothing abnormal: No leap second will be added to our calendar because the Earth’s rotation is in line with “legal” time. Generally it is added on June 30 or December 31.
The calendar no longer follows our planet: in 2020, for example, we recorded the shortest 28 days since 1960. In other words, the Earth’s rotation happened faster than expected, as if 2020 actually ended earlier than we thought. So much so that it was decided to subtract a second, or make the minute 59 seconds arbitrarily difficult.
Read also: In 2020, the Earth rotated so fast that scientists were able to “dump” one second
There is no need to worry, because the rotation of the planet is not completely constant, it is affected by changes in atmospheric pressure, winds, ocean currents and the movement of the heart.
And it would obviously be impossible to “keep up” with every single difference, perhaps a thousandth: the ultra-precise atomic clocks used at the planetary level actually measure Coordinated universal time (UTC) in which everyone sets their own clocks, but it will not be possible to constantly change them. So this was introduced in 1972 trick.
In particular, it has been shown that only when sidereal time, defined as the time it takes the Earth to complete one full rotation, deviates from UTC by more than 0.4 seconds, does UTC change accordingly.
In 2015, we saw an extra second, added to June 30, while the last change came in 2016, when a leap second was added on New Year’s Eve at 23:59:59.
This year is simply “okay”.
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source: IERS Express Service/Forecasting Center
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