Why do leap years exist

But, if you keep subtracting almost 6 hours every year for many years, things can really get messed up. For example, say that July is a warm, summer month where you live. If we never had leap years, all those missing hours would add up into days, weeks and even months. Eventually, in a few hundred years, July would actually take place in the cold winter months!

This is true of almost every other planet in our solar system. Mars, for example, has more leap years than regular years! A year on Mars is sols, or Martian days.

However, it takes Pope Gregory XIII commissioned a modified calendar, one which kept Leap Day but accounted for the inaccuracy by eliminating it on centurial years not divisible by , , and were not leap years, but was. The introduction of the Gregorian Calendar marked the last change to the Western calendar as we know it today.

Experts note that the Gregorian calculation of a solar year— Thankfully, the Gregorian calendar is only off by about one day every 3, years, so mankind has some time before this becomes a problem.

Curiously, many Leap Day customs have revolved around romance and marriage. Tradition holds that in 5th-century Ireland, St. Bridget lamented to St. Patrick that women were not allowed to propose marriage to men. So legend has it that St. Patrick designated the only day that does not occur annually, February 29, as a day on which women would be allowed to propose to men. In some places, Leap Day thus became known as Bachelor's Day. Other cultures have different calendars based on the cycles of the moon rather than the sun and Earth.

The Islamic Al-Hijra calendar has days and adds an extra day every four years as does the traditional Chinese lunar calendar.

Please explain: Why do we have leap years? Faculty of Science and Engineering. Our Stories. Science and Technology. Please Explain. CNN is a leap year, which means we get to enjoy a whole extra day of February, and people born on February 29 finally get some presents. Why do we even have a leap year?

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