Leap Seconds

January 2, 2006 | Astronomy | By: Mark VandeWettering

Unnoticed amidst last night’s revelry was the passage of a scheduled leap second. If you ever wanted to know more about them, you could review the U.S. Naval Observatory page on Leap Seconds. After reading this page, you should be able to understand why the insertion of a leap second does not mean that the earth’s rotation has slowed down by a second out of the year, the source of many misguided extrapolation arguments given against the age of the Earth.