by Emma Sporleder, Student Reporter
A year is usually defined as the amount of time it takes a planet to complete one orbit around the sun. For Earth, this takes 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds, or about 365.25 days. This is called a tropical year or a solar year. A common year, which is what we see on a calendar, has 365 days. Do you notice a problem?
Even though it takes the Earth about 365.25 days to go around the sun, our calendar only has 365 days in a common year. This means that every four years, we need to add an extra day to our calendar to make it match up with the tropical year again. We add an extra day to the calendar in the form of February 29, also known as Leap Day.
Julius Caesar, a soldier and politician who lived in Rome about 2000 years ago, came up with the idea of correcting the calendar. His idea was to add one day to the calendar every four years if the year was evenly divisible by four.
So, for example, the year 1200 is evenly divisible by four, so it would be a leap year, while the year 1350, which isn’t evenly divisible by four, wouldn’t be a leap year.
Therefore, 1700, 1800, 1900 were not leap years, and 2100 will not be a leap year. But, 1600 and 2000 were leap years because those year numbers are evenly divisible by 400.
People born on Leap Day are called Leaplings. There are only about 5 million people in the whole world who were born on Feb. 29, with the odds of being born on Leap Day standing at about 1-in-1,461.
Several famous people including actress and singer Dinah Shore (born 1916), motivational speaker Tony Robbins (born 1960) and hip-hop artist Ja Rule (born 1976) are leaplings. Leaplings technically only get to celebrate their birthdays once every four years, but they do get bragging rights for being born on a day that only happens every four years.