Planet Earth records the shortest day ever… Know the details

by time news

Friday, July 29, 2022 03:12 PM

The globe completed a full rotation around itself, which should take 24 hours, in a period less than 1.59 milliseconds, due to the increasing speed with which the Earth rotates around itself in the recent period.

According to “Sputnik”, the Earth recorded the first shortest day ever measured since the 1960s, in 2020, when it rotated around itself in less than 24 hours by about 1.47 milliseconds.

The Earth continued to accelerate during the year 2021, but without records, before recording this year’s records initially referred to, however, the Earth’s cycle appears to be slowing down in the long term, as it takes a few thousandths of a second more to complete each century, according to Monte Carlo report.

The reason behind this phenomenon is not clear to scientists, but they believe that it may be due to changes in the inner or outer layers of the planet or in the oceans, or perhaps to tidal factors or climate changes.

But what does that mean? If the Earth continues its acceleration, this may result in the approval of what is known as the “negative leap second”, with the aim of keeping the rate at which the Earth orbits around the sun consistent with the measurement of atomic hours.

But this “leap second”, a potentially negative or positive one-second adjustment to the UTC timescale that depends on Earth’s rotation, may cause problems for IT systems, and major tech companies have already warned that the move is “risky and doing more harm than good.” “.


What will happen is that the day will be one second lower before the time resets to 00:00:00. This may lead to software failure or data corruption due to timestamps related to data storage.

It is noteworthy that the Coordinated Universal Time, the basic time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time, has been updated by leap second 27 times so far, the last of which was in 2016.

Also, due to the instability of the Earth’s rotation speed, scientists invented the atomic clock in the 1950’s in order to accurately track time, but because of the irregularity of the Earth’s rotation, whether in terms of acceleration or deceleration of this rotation, and in light of the stability of the atomic clock timing, it became clear that there is a difference Between the atomic clock and astronomical time, which is calculated according to the rotation of the Earth.

It is worth noting that in order to address this difference between the timing of the atomic clock and astronomical time, scientists have devised the Coordinated Universal Time “UTC” to help reduce the difference between Earth time and the atomic clock. In order to keep the timing of the Earth’s rotation and the atomic clock in sync with each other.

Source: Technology: Planet Earth records the shortest day ever.. Know the details

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