Because 2024 is a leap year, February will have more days than usual. Check out the expert explanation on this.
A Leap Year is a year that is divisible by four and divisible by 400. This year has a longer day, namely 366 days, while normally it has 365 days.
That additional day is February 29th. In normal years, February usually ends on the 28th and goes straight to March 1st.
In addition to the Gregorian or Western calendar, the Hebrew, Islamic, Chinese, and Ethiopian calendars also have their own leap years.
However, years in the above-mentioned calendars do not all come every four years and often occur in different years from leap years in the Gregorian calendar.
Some calendars also have multiple leap days or even shortened leap months.
In addition to leap years and leap days, the Gregorian calendar also has some leap seconds, which are sporadically added to certain years, last in 2012, 2015, and 2016.
However, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (IBWM), which is responsible for global time accuracy, will abolish leap seconds starting in 2035 and beyond.
Why are leap years necessary?
Leap years, citing LiveScience, exist because one year in the Gregorian calendar is slightly shorter than a solar year, which is the amount of time it takes for the Earth to orbit the Sun once fully.
One calendar year is exactly 365 days long. However, one solar year is approximately 365.24 days, or 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 56 seconds.
If we don’t account for this difference, the impact is on the timing of the seasons. Then in 700 years, summer in the Northern Hemisphere will start in December, not June, according to the National Air and Space Museum.
Adding a leap day every fourth year will eliminate most of this problem. Because the length of the additional day, namely 366 days because there is a February 29th, is almost the same as the accumulated difference during that time.
However, this system is still not perfect because we gain about 44 extra minutes each year or about one day every 129 years.
To address this issue, we skip leap years every hundred years except leap years divisible by 400, such as 1600 and 2000.
However, there is still a small difference between the calendar year and the solar year, which is why IBWM has experimented with leap seconds.
Overall, leap years mean the Gregorian calendar remains synchronized with the Earth’s journey around the Sun.
Leap Year History
Since 45 BC, leap years have existed, when the ancient Roman Emperor Julius Caesar established the Julian calendar consisting of 365 days and 12 months.
The Julian calendar included a leap year every four years without exception and was synchronized with the seasons on Earth thanks to the “confused last year” in 46 BC, which included 15 months totaling 445 days, according to the University of Houston.
For centuries, the Julian calendar seemed to work perfectly.
In the mid-16th century, astronomers noticed that the seasons started about 10 days earlier than expected when important holidays, such as Easter, were no longer accompanied by specific events, such as the spring equinox or the onset of spring.
To address this, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar in 1582, which was the same as the Julian calendar but with the exception of leap years for most centuries by a hundred.
For centuries, the Gregorian calendar was only used by Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain. Eventually, Protestant countries such as Great Britain also adopted it in 1752.
Due to calendar differences, countries that later switched to the Gregorian calendar had to skip days to synchronize with other countries around the world.
For example, when Britain switched calendars in 1752, September 2nd was followed by September 14th, according to the Royal Museums Greenwich.
In the future, the Gregorian calendar may need to be reassessed because it is not synchronized with the solar year. However, this would take thousands of years to materialize.
