As the end of the of year draws near, so does the final countdown, however you will have to go over the 11:59:60 mark, owing to the addition of an extra leap second this year.
These leap seconds come in handy, as they make up for the gradual slowing of Earths rotation and to ensure that our clocks stay precisely in sync with Earths days.
The IERS (international earth rotation and reference systems service) at the Paris Observatory in France says, This extra second, or leap second, makes it possible to align astronomical time, which is irregular and determined by Earths rotation, with coordinated universal time (UTC) which is extremely stable and has been determined by atomic clocks since 1967.
The moment of the leap second addition is dependent on your time zone with the UTC being the standard; to put it simply the final minute of 2016 will last for 61 seconds.
"The sequence of dates of the UTC second markers will be: 2016 December 31 23h 59m 59s, 2016 December 31 23h 59m 60s, 2017 January 1, 0h 0m 0s," the IERS website states.
A leap second was added last year at the end of June, and it is usually done either in the middle or at the end of the year, because our poor old technology cannot handle slotting the extra second in anywhere else.
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