Many people have deemed 2016 as the “worst year ever.” Well, if you’re under the belief that 2016 sucked then you will not welcome this piece of news. The final minute of 2016 will be exactly one second longer than every other minute of the year. This ought to go well.
This phenomenon is called a “leap second” and is caused because the speed of Earth’s rotation does not cooperate with our accurate atomic clocks. Earth’s rotation is gradually spinning slower and slower every year causing the leap second.
“This extra second, or leap second, makes it possible to align astronomical time, which is irregular and determined by Earth’s rotation, with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) which is extremely stable and has been determined by atomic clocks since 1967,” explained the Paris Observatory in France, which houses the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS), responsible for synchronising time.
This time correction is usually done either on midnight in the middle of the year on June 30th or December 31st of any given year
It’s a pretty common occurrence and has happened 1992 through 1995, but from 1999 until the end of 2005 it did not happen. The most recent leap second was added in June of 2015.
So this is just one more second for 2016 to snatch one last celebrity from us.
Great.
[FoxNews]