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Leap Years Explained:
First of all, for anyone wondering, let's start with a common question: When is the next leap year? It'll be in the year 2020. In this video we explain to you why we have them and why sometimes there are exceptions.
To get a better understanding you should try to understand what exactly defines a year. It is the time it takes our planet Earth to circle around the sun. We use a 365 days calendar and we have 24 hours per day. That adds up to 8760 hours in a single year.
If however we would exactly time the Earth's travel around the sun without paying attention to our schedule, this number is different. In fact it took us 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds longer.
This is almost 6 hours per year, so after 4 years almost an entire day. We need to compensate this "extra" day by adding one to the month of February. Now we're back on track.
Well, almost. Because it's not exactly 6 hours like we mentioned before. It's a little less. Therefore, after 100 years, we would have gained an extra day. So what do we do? We skip the leap year every century. We do that whenever a year is precisely dividable by 100. In other words, in the year 2100 we won't have a leap year.
So how about the future? By this math we would lose another day every 400 years. So what do we do about that? Well, we put the leap year back in place every 400 years. As a rule you could say that whenever a year is precisely dividable by 400 we skip the previous rule of 100 years. Therefore in the year 2000 we had a leap year and we'll also have one in the year 2400. Makes sense? We hope it does.
The video explains everything to you in a matter of minutes. We hope you enjoy it.
