December 31 Marks The Historic Event Of Adding A 'Leap Second' At 23:59:59 P.M. By U.S. Naval Observatory, Here's What It's All About

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People have seen "Leap Year" but 2016 will mark the historic event of "Leap Second". The waves, warmer weather, and other factors are responsible for this historic happening.

Geoff Chester of U.S. Naval Observatory stated the denser and warmer flow of from El Nino, the interaction of Moon and gravity towards tides creation and other factors interfere with the rotation of the Earth resulting in slowing down its rotation around its own axis and now it will take a little longer time to come back from where it started.

A day is clocked at 23:59:59 which makes up 24 Hours which is the time taken by Earth to rotate a complete circle on its own axis. Due to natural factors, the earth has eventually slowed down and to adjust the time, the U.S. Naval Observatory will undertake a historic event of adding a "Leap Second" on December 31, at 23:59:59 p.m. at UTC or Coordinated Universal Time. The new timeline will be 23:59:60. At the Eastern Standard Time, the leap second will correspond at 6:59:59 p.m. The Master Clock Facility in Washington, D.C. will be used to add the leap year. Mail Online stated.

Time is being calculated since a very long time. Earlier, the rotation of Earth with respect to celestial bodies that accounted for the mean time. Atomic Clocks gave more accurate time. The working of a Cesium based Atomic Clock propounded by How Stuff Works states that the Cesium 133 oscillates when kept under Crystal oscillator so that it can resonate. When charged up, it oscillates at 9,192,631,770 Hz of frequency that is in Layman language, 9,192,631,770 oscillations per second and when at the point where it completes the given oscillations, a second counts. Cesium Atomic Clocks are one million lines accurate than any other astronomical techniques.

The Washington Post elaborated the historic event of the leap second. According to its reports, 2 milliseconds are added per day per century due to decelerating of Earth's rotation which added one second every 500 days. The decision to add a leap second in the atomic clock is to make the clock more accurate. A total of 26 seconds has been added since 1972 in order to keep the atomic clocks synced with the rotation of the Earth.

Google, a world's biggest Search engine, has an enormous number of servers that are clocked as per the Cesium atomic clock. In order to add a leap second, Google has derived an idea to do it in a course of 20 hours on the New Year's Eve when its server clocks will tick one second by adding 13.9 microseconds more.