18 October 2012

Leap year

No, this is not about the movie.

This is about the leap year we on earth experience every four years. What this means is that every four years the month of February has an extra day, so instead of 28 days, it has 29 days. Still the shortest month nonetheless. It also means that our year has 366 instead of 365 days.

Why does this happen?
Our earth years doesn't actually have 365 days. The earth takes 365 and a quarter days to travel around the sun. But because it wouldn't make sense for us to have a quarter day, it was decided to have a leap year every four years to get us back on track (hence the name leap, as we actually leap to the actual place in the earth's orbit where we are.)

If we didn't have a leap year and all our years just had 365 days, then somewhere along the timeline our months and weather cycles would start to not make sense. If you have summer in June, then after (365/2)*4 = 730 years summer would occur in December. This just wouldn't make sense.

Happy 29th February! (In 2016.)

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