BY JONATHAN JEFFERSON With next year [2016] being a Leap Year, which only occurs every four years, the following is a brief overview of the history and science of the phenomenon. As a note, I was born on Leap Day in 2000, which was a special Leap Year because it was the first time the third rule for identifying a Leap Year, as stated by the Gregorian Calendar, was used in most areas of the world since the change from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar. Leap Day occurs on February 29 and is important because Leap Years are necessary to keep our calendar, the modern Gregorian Calendar, in alignment with Earth’s revolutions around the Sun, which takes about 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds to do so once. Since the Gregorian Calendar only has 365 days in a year, if one day were not added to the year close to every four years, our calendars would be off six hours every year. Therefore, if we did not have a Leap Day, our calendars would be incorrect by about 24 days after 100 years. Julius Caesar created Leap Day in 45 BCE when he created the Julian Calendar, which added one extra day every four years. As a note, the ancient Romans did have a calendar, however, that added one extra month every few years, but Caesar introduced Leap Day. Caesar;s rule was that any year evenly divisible by four would be a Leap Year. At that time, Leap Day fell on February 24, and February was the last month of the year instead of the second. However, this created a problem. The Julian Calendar’s one rule of saying that any year divisible by four was a Leap Year created too many Leap Years. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII fixed the problem when he introduced the Gregorian Calendar, the calendar we use today. He also introduced three new rules that determined if a year were a Leap Year: 1. A Leap Year can only be a Leap Year if the year is evenly divisible by four. 2. If the year is evenly divisible by 100, it is NOT a Leap Year, unless… 3. …the year is evenly divisible by 400. |
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