What is leap year?
Five thousand years ago the Egyptians divided the year into twelve months and each month is divided into a certain number of days. Three years out of every four, a year has 365 days in it. In the fourth year, there are 366 days. This is a leap year. Every leap year an extra day is added to the month of February. Normally, February has 28 days in it, but in a leap year it has 29 days.
The purpose of this is to make up the difference between the calendar year and the solar year. It is convenient for us in daily life to go by a calendar year of 365 days. The solar year, which measures time by the movement of the Earth round the Sun, is actually 365 days and about six hours long. In four years, these six hours a year make an extra day, so we have a year with an extra day in it, a leap year.
Calendars sometimes show the positions of planets and stars and the phases of the moon.
Leap Year Explained
Leap years synchronize the calendar year with the solar year
Why do we need leap year?
The Gregorian calendar, which now serves as the standard calendar for civil use throughout the world, has both common years and leap years. A common year has 365 days and a leap year 366 days, with the extra, or intercalary, day designated as February 29. A leap year occurs every four years to help synchronize the calendar year with the solar year, or the length of time it takes the earth to complete its orbit about the sun, which is about 365¼ days.
The length of the solar year, however, is slightly less than 365¼ days—by about 11 minutes. To compensate for this discrepancy, the leap year is omitted three times every four hundred years.
In other words, a century year cannot be a leap year unless it is divisible by 400. Thus 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not leap years, but 1600, 2000, and 2400 are leap years.
What are your chances of being born on leap day?
About 1 in 1500.
When is the birthday party?
If you are born on a Leap Year, do you get your driver's license on February 28th or March 1st? It is an ambiguous question that is decided by each state. Most states, however, consider March 1st the official day. For instance, the Michigan Vehicle Code states that people born on February 29th "are deemed to have been born on March 1st."
How many people were born on leap day?
There are about 187,000 people in the US and 4 million people in the world who were born on Leap Day.
The rules for determining a leap year
Most years that can be divided evenly by 4 are leap years.
Exception: Century years are NOT leap years UNLESS they can be evenly divided by 400.
When did leap year originate?
The Gregorian calendar is closely based on the Julian calendar, which was introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BC. The Julian calendar featured a 12-month, 365-day year, with an intercalary day inserted every fourth year at the end of February to make an average year of 365.25 days. But because the length of the solar year is actually 365.242216 days, the Julian year was too long by .0078 days (11 minutes 14 seconds).
This may not seem like a lot, but over the course of centuries it added up, until in the 16th century, the vernal equinox was falling around March 11 instead of March 21. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII adjusted the calendar by moving the date ahead by 11 days and by instituting the exception to the rule for leap years. This new rule, whereby a century year is a leap year only if divisible by 400, is the sole feature that distinguishes the Gregorian calendar from the Julian calendar.
Following the Gregorian reform, the average length of the year was 365.2425 days, an even closer approximation to the solar year. At this rate, it will take more than 3,000 years for the Gregorian calendar to gain one extra day in error.
by Ann Marie Imbornoni & Mark Hughes
* O dia 29 de fevereiro, é chamado de 'leap day'. Já o ano com 365 dias é chamado de 'common year'.
* A pessoa que nasce no
'leap day' é chamada de
'leapling' ou
'leaper'. A revista Forbes até listou algumas celebridades que nasceram no dia 29 de fevereiro. (
clique aqui para ler a reportagem)
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