Why do we have a leap year anyway?

day everyone happy jump world! That's right, 2016 is a leap year, which means we can enjoy a whole extra day of February, and people who were born on February 29 finally get some gifts.

But why do we have leap years?

Our calendar is 365 days in a year, because it is more or less the time it takes the Earth to orbit the Sun The problem is that in reality it takes the Earth about 365 ¼ days (actually 365.24219 days) to circle the Sun (which is a solar year), which means that our schedule is out for around a quarter of one day a year.

This discrepancy was discovered some time ago.

In 45 BC a decree by Julius Caesar began the practice of adding an extra day every four years, with the creation of the Julian calendar - offsetting these quarter days.

That would be perfect if a solar year were exactly 365 ¼ days - 365.242 but a tiny bit less than that, and eventually teeny little sum.

1582 AD slight discrepancy in the Julian calendar adds up to 10 days. So Pope Gregory XIII created the Gregorian calendar, coined the term "leap year" and set February 29 as the official date to add to a leap year. Also he introduced a rule to account for the discrepancy in the Julian calendar.

Now, a leap year occurs in every year that is divisible by four, but only in the years of the century are evenly divided by 400.

Therefore, 800, 1200 and 2000 were leap years - 1700 and 1900, but were not, because although they are divisible by four, which are not divisible by 400.

So all arranged. Well, not quite. The solar year is about 26 shorter than the Gregorian year when seconds - but that's a problem for another day.

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