Leap Year (Meaning and Explanation)

We explain what a leap year is, how often it occurs and why. In addition, we tell you the difference between the calendar year and the calendar year.

calendar leap year — The leap year brings together the fractions of time that accumulate over four solar years.

What is a leap year?

a leap year It is a year endowed with an additional day at the end of the month of February (February 29) and which occurs once every four regular years. This “extra” day brings together the fractions of time left over from the previous four years, given that in the traditional calendar a year consists of 365 days and not the 365 days with 5 hours 48 minutes and 45.10 seconds that the year establishes. solar or tropical calculated astronomically.

Thus, there is an annual time lag that requires correction, which is corrected by adding one day to February every four years. This strategy was already present in the Julian calendar of Roman antiquity, when the day was intercalated between February 23 and 24. Hence “leap” is the abbreviation of the expression ““bis sextus dies ante calendas martii” (“repeated on the sixth day before the first day of March”). The idea of adding a leap year to the calendar It is attributed to the Roman emperor Julius Caesar (100-44 BC), after his arrival in Egypt in the year 49 BC. c.

Until then the Roman calendar was very inaccurate and was centuries late on its own account, so Julius Caesar commissioned the wise Sosigenes of Alexandria to develop a new calendar, whose implementation he made the year 46 BC. C. the longest in Roman history (445 days long), to wait for the right point and start from scratch. This is how the Julian calendar was born, in which a leap year was added every four years.

Calendar year and calendar year

The terms “calendar year” and “calendar year” refer to the same period of time of twelve months, but calculated from different parameters, as follows:

calendar year. This is a period of 12 months elapsed from any calendar day until its immediate future repetition. That is, there is a calendar year between July 5, 2010 and July 5, 2011.
Calendar year. This is a period of 12 months from January 1 to December 31, and is conventionally considered a complete cycle in the current Gregorian calendar. This will depend, however, on which calendar is used: some use different lunar or solar cycles, so their years will have a different length.

Business year and fiscal year

The calendar year is used not only to keep track of days, but to plan human activities. In that sense, it allows the invention of other types of year, which more or less coincide with the calendar span, but which are applied in very specific areas of society. This is the case, for example, of the business year and the fiscal year.

Fiscal or financial year. Like the calendar year, it lasts 12 months, but it does not necessarily begin and end on the same days of January and December. This is a year that concerns only tax and payment obligations, that is, the State bureaucracy, which allows the annual financial activity to be sectored and organized.
Business year. It is endowed with only 360 days, the result of the simplification of the calendar year, assigning 30 days to each month in an entirely artificial or conventional way. It is a transactional calendar, useful for calculating bank interest and for commercial discounts, among other matters of commercial competition and the field of transactions, such as rents.

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School year

The school year, academic year or school year It is the annual cycle of studies that takes place in schools, institutes and universities of a country. During the school year, students attend their educational centers, so vacation periods are not part of this.

The school years determine the beginning and completion of the annual class periods (whether or not they coincide with the fiscal year), and also the stratification of the different degrees of study according to their instruction time: first year, second year, and so on.

gap year

A gap year is a year of rest or preparation, generally applicable to the academic field, to name the study and research periods available to university teachers and professorsin order for them to build new lines of research, which leads them to temporarily interrupt their teaching practice.

However, The origin of the term comes from an agricultural custom in Antiquity that gave the land a year of “rest.” after every sixth consecutive harvest year, so that the soils would replenish their nutrients and not deplete their fertility. The word “sabbatical” shares its origin with the day “Saturday”: shabbat of the Hebrew people, which means “the (day) of rest.”

Light-year

In the field of astrophysics, it is called a light year (al. or al) the distance that light travels in a vacuum during the time span of a Julian year (that is, 365.25 days of 24 hours each). It is a unit of length that allows us to express in a simple and efficient way the distances of sidereal space, whose expression in kilometers would be too long and cumbersome to handle. one light year specifically equivalent to about 9.46 x 10¹² kilometersthat is, 9,460,730,472,580.8 kilometers.