People have been left ‘mind-blown’ after discovering there’s a little-known rule that means leap years aren’t always every 4 years – as sometimes we skip one.
Get ready to question everything you know about leap years.
We all understand the basic rules for how we measure time. We know there are 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week, and 365 days in a non-leap year, jumping to 366 days every four years – a pattern we all learned as children.
But what if these rules weren’t entirely true?
You likely will have learned at school that leap years are necessary because the Earth’s orbit around the sun takes slightly longer than 365 days and that to compensate, we add an extra day every four years.
But a man on TikTok named Luc shook the internet after revealing a startling rule that comes into play once a century, upending the very foundations of our understanding of time.
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@lucdeantho
Leap year shenanigans
original sound – LUC DEAN
In a viral clip, Luc announced his newfound knowledge: “Leap years are not just every four years. I am 33-years-old and I am just learning this. It doesn’t affect me because I won’t be alive when it’s relevant, but just in case you wanted to know, leap years are every four years except when the year is divisible by 100. So the year 2100 will not be a leap year.”
The leap year conundrum has left many scratching their heads, and it turns out there’s another obscure rule that even fewer are aware of. The year 2000 was a leap year, even though that’s divisible by 100, because of this exception.
Luc revealed: “The exception to the divide by 100 rule is if it can also be divided by 400.”
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This might seem like a concoction of confusion, but it’s actually grounded in science, as confirmed by the National Air and Space Museum in the US, who delve into the specifics on their website.
The necessity for these seemingly odd rules stems from the fact that our days aren’t exactly 24 hours long – they’re precisely 23.262222 hours. By introducing a leap year every four years, we’re overshooting the mark by over 44 minutes, hence the need to recalibrate occasionally to prevent our seasons from drifting apart.
According to experts: “The rule is that if the year is divisible by 100 and not divisible by 400, the 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.”
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Users reacting to Luc’s video expressed their astonishment, with some accusing scientists of “making it up as they go”, while others questioned the origins of this perplexing system.
One said: “This feels like when my kids try making up their own rules for board games.” Another confessed: “I don’t understand how leap years work and I think that I’m just not meant to.”
Sourse: www.express.co.uk
