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General discussion
Why is there a leap year in calendar
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1 Reply
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The addition of a leap year to the calendar is necessary to keep our modern calendar in alignment with the Earth’s revolutions around the Sun. A leap year is a year that contains an extra day, February 29th, which is added to the calendar every four years.
The Earth takes approximately 365.24 days to complete one orbit around the Sun. To account for this fractional part of a day, the leap year system was devised. By adding an extra day to the calendar every four years, we account for the additional 0.24 days, which over time would cause the calendar to drift out of sync with the solar year.
However, the rule of adding a leap year every four years is not applied uniformly. There are additional rules to determine which years are leap years and which are not. The basic rule is that a year is a leap year if it is divisible by 4. However, there are exceptions to this rule. Years that are divisible by 100 are not leap years, unless they are also divisible by 400. This exception is made to keep the calendar more closely aligned with the solar year, as the Earth’s orbit is not precisely 365.25 days long.
By adding a leap year every four years with the appropriate exceptions, the calendar remains relatively synchronized with the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, allowing us to keep track of time accurately for practical and astronomical purposes.
