The year 2024 gets an extra day. Why?
A year is typically defined as 365 days. Duke University physics professor Ronen Plesser explained a subtle tweak to the definition: A year is “the time that it takes the earth to go around the sun, or more importantly, the time it takes for our seasons to repeat, for summer, to repeat back into summer.”
The actual time for the revolution around the sun is, he said, “365 and a quarter days or in fact a little bit less than that.”
Without a leap day, the calendar falls out of sync, accumulating at the rate of one day every four years, he said. “After 100years, you’re 25 days or a month out of sync.”
For a full explanation of how leap year functions, watch Plesser’s video:
