Instead of the standard 365 days we see every year, we get an extra 24 hours in 2024 thanks to it being a leap year.
February 2024 will have an extra day added to the calendar. February is the shortest month of the year, but every four years we add a leap day, the last leap year we had was in 2020 and there won't be another one until 2028.
Take a look at how leap days became a part of our calendar, when it falls and everything else you need to know about this day that comes once every four years.
February usually has 28 days and is the shortest month of the year, but every four years the month gets an additional day.
Why do we have leap years?
A typical year is just a little over 365 days. More accurately it is 365 days 5 hours 48 minutes and 56 seconds, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Museum. That extra 5 hours 48 minutes and 56 seconds starts to add up and needs to be accounted for somehow. Hence, leap years... sort of.
If we don't account for this extra time, the seasons would begin to drift and soon summer would be in the middle of December.
But extra leap days are still slightly shorter than 24 hours, according to The Smithsonian. To account for time shifts, not every four years gets to be a leap year.
"The rule is that if the year is divisible by 100 and not divisible by 400, leap year is skipped. The year 2000 was a leap year, for example, but the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not.The next time a leap year will be skipped is the year 2100," read an article from the Smithsonian.
Why is Feb. 29 leap day?
Choosing February for the leap year dates back way before many modern-day countries were even formed. The addition of days harkens back to reforms made to the Roman calendar by Julius Caesar,according to History.com.
Caesar, inspired by the Egyptian solar calendar, made the adjustments to the Roman calendar which was based on a lunar system and had a year of 355 days. The adjustments brought forth the Julian calendar, a solar calendar, which included a leap year system. When the Julian calendar was later refined into the Gregorian calendar in 1582, the tradition of adding a leap day to February persisted.
Leap day babies: How many are there and when do they celebrate?
Having a birthday on a leap day doesn't stop the aging process.
It's estimated around 5 million people share Feb. 29 as a birthday and the special moniker of "leaplings".
Many of the people who were born during leap years celebrate their birthdays on either Feb. 28 or March 1.
Celebrities born on leap day, Feb. 29
Here is a list of some celebrities born on Feb. 29, according tofamousbirthdays.com.
Rapper Ja Rule
Motivational speaker Tony Robbins
Mark Foster, lead singer of Foster the People ("Pumped Up Kicks," "Sit Next to Me")
Actor Peter Scanavino ("Law and Order: Special Victims Unit")
Actor Antonio Sabato Jr. ("Melrose Place," "General Hospital")
Leap years exist because we need to play a bit of astronomical catch up. The time it takes for Earth to orbit the sun doesn't work out to an even number of days. A solar year
solar year
A tropical year or solar year (or tropical period) is the time that the Sun takes to return to the same position in the sky – as viewed from the Earth or another celestial body of the Solar System – thus completing a full cycle of astronomical seasons.
Leap Day every four years keeps our calendar in sync with the Earth's orbit, preventing a drift of 24 days every century and ensuring our seasons stay on track. This simple adjustment maintains the accuracy of our timekeeping and avoids major disruptions to farming and seasonal celebrations.
And just why do we have an extra day every four years? Instead of the standard 365 days we see every year, we get an extra 24 hours in 2024 thanks to it being a leap year. February 2024 will have an extra day added to the calendar.
According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), Earth's one revolution around the Sun takes a bit longer than that. 365 days, 5 hours and 48 minutes to be precise. So, to correct the calculations, we add one day to every four years, making the fourth one 366 days long. It is known as a leap year.
Leap years are necessary because the Earth's orbit around the Sun is not exactly 365 days. We add an extra day every four years to correct this discrepancy.
Leap years help to keep the 12-month calendar matched up with Earth's movement around the Sun. After four years, those leftover hours add up to a whole day. In a leap year, we add this extra day to the month of February, making it 29 days long instead of the usual 28.
“Without the leap years, after a few hundred years we will have summer in November,” said Younas Khan, a physics instructor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Christmas will be in summer. There will be no snow. There will be no feeling of Christmas.”
If you're born in a leap year, when can you legally drink, vote, or drive? Legality in terms of drinking and voting is not impacted by leap years, even if someone is "technically" not 18 or 21. If you're born on February 29, your birthday would be observed after 11:59 p.m. on Feb.28 — or March 1 — on non-leap years.
The year has to be evenly divisible by 4 to be a leap year. It's not a leap year if the year can be evenly divided by 100 unless that year can also be evenly divided by 400, thanks to Pope Gregory XIII.
To maintain the synchronous timetable of the seasonal year, there is an additional calendar day added to February every four years. “Summer starts around June,” Khan said, “but without the leap years, after a few hundred years we will have summer in November.”
Those born on that day don't always get to celebrate their actual birthday — since that date occurs only every four years. Someone born on Leap Day typically celebrates birthdays on Feb.28 or March 1.
This means that when the Roman calendar added an extra day in February, they were in fact adding a day at the end of their year. So the simple answer is that we put the leap day at the end of February because the Romans did.
Unfortunately, 12 times (any odd number) is always an even number. To make the number of days on the calendar add up to 365 in a year, there would have to be one month with an even number. February was chosen to have 28 days as this was when the Romans honoured their dead.
"If we didn't account for this extra time, the seasons would begin to drift," the article goes on to say. "This would be annoying if not devastating, because over a period of about 700 years our summers, which we've come to expect in June in the northern hemisphere, would begin to occur in December."
The current year by the Gregorian calendar, AD 2024, is 12024 HE in the Holocene calendar. The HE scheme was first proposed by Cesare Emiliani in 1993 (11993 HE), though similar proposals to start a new calendar at the same date had been put forward decades earlier.
To fix his culture's calendar, Roman emperor Julius Caesar created the Year of Confusion when he decided that the year 46 B.C. was going to be 445 days long instead of 365 days long. He then made a 365.25-day year—a tiny bit longer than the 365.2422 solar year—that added a leap day every fourth year.
The extra day keeps calendars and seasons from gradually falling out of sync and impacting harvesting, planting and other cycles based on the seasons. Without Leap Days, in 100 years, calendars would be 24 days off, CBS Minnesota reported, and in 700 years, Northern Hemisphere summers would begin in December.
By adding an extra day every four years, the Gregorian calendar helps maintain the proper timing of the seasons and ensures that they occur at their expected times.
We all know that leap day exists because a year isn't exactly 365 days. "The total amount of time it takes the Earth to complete a revolution around the sun is not exactly a whole number of days," said Renu Malhotra, Regents Professor in the Department of Planetary Sciences. "It falls about six hours short of that.
Introduction: My name is Kerri Lueilwitz, I am a courageous, gentle, quaint, thankful, outstanding, brave, vast person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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