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Clock time and calendar time have duodecimal or sexagesimal orders of magnitude rather than decimal, e.g., a year is 12 months, and a minute is 60 seconds. The smallest meaningful increment of time is the Planck time―the time light takes to traverse the Planck distance, many decimal orders of magnitude smaller than a second. [1]
For example, the year cannot be divided into twelve 28-day months since 12 times 28 is 336, well short of 365. The lunar month (as defined by the moon's rotation) is not 28 days but 28.3 days. The year, defined in the Gregorian calendar as 365.2425 days has to be adjusted with leap days and leap seconds. Consequently, these units are now all ...
A leap year occurs every fourth year during which a leap day is intercalated into the month of February. The name "Leap Day" is applied to the added day. In astronomy, the Julian year is a unit of time defined as 365.25 days, each of exactly 86 400 seconds (SI base unit), totaling exactly 31,557,600 seconds in the Julian astronomical year. [4] [5]
It has since been set backward 8 times and forward 18 times. The farthest time from midnight was 17 minutes in 1991, and the nearest is 89 seconds, set in January 2025. [5] The Clock was moved to 150 seconds (2 minutes, 30 seconds) in 2017, then forward to 2 minutes to midnight in 2018, and left unchanged in 2019. [6]
A Gregorian year, which takes into account the 100 vs. 400 leap year exception rule of the Gregorian calendar, is 365.2425 days (the average length of a year over a 400–year cycle), resulting in 0.1 years being a period of 36.52425 days (3 155 695.2 seconds; 36 days, 12 hours, 34 minutes, 55.2 seconds).
In 1956, the second was redefined in terms of a year relative to that epoch. The second was thus defined as "the fraction 1 ⁄ 31,556,925.9747 of the tropical year for 1900 January 0 at 12 hours ephemeris time". [13] This definition was adopted as part of the International System of Units in 1960. [15]
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1.67 minutes (or 1 minute 40 seconds) 10 3: kilosecond: 1 000: 16.7 minutes (or 16 minutes and 40 seconds) 10 6: megasecond: 1 000 000: 11.6 days (or 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds) 10 9: gigasecond: 1 000 000 000: 31.7 years (or 31 years, 252 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes, 40 seconds, assuming that there are 7 leap years in the interval)