You Get Extra Time Today: Leap Second Added To The Clock

    You get a little extra time today… very little.

    FOX News Radio’s Lisa Lacerra reports:

    Just before 8pm ET, the entire planet will get a bonus second.

    Leap seconds used to come around about once a year starting in 1972, but they’ve become less common.

    NASA’s Daniel MacMillan saying Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing down so leap seconds are a way to account for that. If we let all the fractions of seconds that are lost day after day pile up, our standard of time would stop keeping in sync with the actual behavior of the planet.

    NASA is now working on a new system that’s expected to have better precision that will help scientists better track the long term patterns in how the Earth’s rotation is slowing and make us more sensitive to tiny shifts in time.

    Lisa Lacerra, FOX News Radio.

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