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Asked by lukep to Carol, Ellie, John, Philip, Rebecca on 2 Jul 2012.
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Carol White answered on 2 Jul 2012:
The “simple” answer would be 24 hours x 365 days = 8760 hours.
BUT leap years would be 24 hours x 366 days = 8784 hours.
A year is not exactly 365 days – which is why we have a leap year every 4 years. So we could be more accurate and say the average year is 365.25 days which = 8766 hours in a year!
But the science doesn’t stop there, The accurate number of seconds in a year = 31,556,925.9747, because the earth’s orbit changes slightly, which if you divide by 60 to get minutes, and b 60 again to get hours.. the final answer is:
8765.8127 hours in a year!
Now that is a long answer….
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Rebecca Lacey answered on 2 Jul 2012:
One year is equal to 8766.1536 hours
As Carol says there are are 8760 hours in a year but 8784 in a leap year.
However this was not always the case. For example in 1752 we switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar so September the 2nd was immediately followed by September 14th, and 11 days were dropped from the calendar that year! So that year there would have been 8496 hours!
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John Welford answered on 2 Jul 2012:
Carol and Rebecca have given you some pretty accurate answers already.
The only thing I can add its that there are a few different ways of keeping time, that vary very slightly. The most common one is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This occasionally inserts “leap seconds” to keep it close to mean solar time.
A leap second was added on Saturday just before midnight, which means that there was a 23:59:60 second before 00:00:00 on Sunday! This doesn’t happen very often, maximum of about once per year.
What did you do with your extra second at the weekend?
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