Share this

Aliens Planets Also Need Leap Days, Too?

Nature earth gives us the opportunity to leap days In our calenders. Leap days gives us an extra day to live our life. Another planet should also need to explore this opportunity of the extra day.

Today Saturday, you got a gift of time. Feb. 29 is a leap day — a calendar that gives us an extra day to enjoy our life.

May be You know why: The time it takes Earth to rotate on its axis is called a day — but it doesn’t take an even number of days to complete a single loop around the sun or one orbit. Instead it takes 365.2422 spins. That means that when the time strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve, Earth hasn’t quite circled all the way back to its starting point.

Richard binzel a planetary scientist at the MIT,” Said After four day , everybody need one full day to catch up his work. Its the same for the earth’s orbit on all your work.Its the same for the earth’s orbit and the calendar.”

So every four years, the month of February has 29 days instead of 28.

These contortions are awkward, but they’re fairly straightforward compared with the adjustments that would need to be made to the calendars of alien civilizations if they existed elsewhere in our solar system.

If alien civilizations existed elsewhere in our solar system.Is they also included leap year in his calendar .Or How they named this day? This questions comes up in our mind .

On Planet Mars, a year ends in 668.6 Martian days. Should the calendar year include only 668 days, it would quickly fall out with the Martian seasons.The astronomers, science-fiction writers and enthusiastic hobbyists have presented several proposals for Martian calendars.

A retired NASA scientist said that I daresay there have been more different proposals for Mars calendars than there are different calendars for the Earth.

One of the most popular Darian calendars was created in 1985 by Thomas Gangale, He is a space law expert. It breaks up the long year into 24 months of 27 and 28 Martian days — each of which alternates between Latin and Sanskrit names for constellations of the zodiac, like Virgo and its Sanskrit equivalent, Kanya.

They thought that it was important to maintain similarities to Earth’s calendar, just in case future Martians wanted to celebrate major holidays. So he retained the 12 months we know and love, then added 10 extra months (each is 30 or 31 days) and named them after Johannes Kepler, Ray Bradbury and other famous astronomers, mathematicians and science-fiction writers.

While there have been many imaginative calendars suggested for Mars, none is in common use.

The project manager of NASA said “We count Martian days and Martian years, Mars Exploration Rover project, which directs the Curiosity rover. “But we don’t care right now that seasonal events may be drifting relative to calendar events.”

So scientists and engineers who work on surface missions on the red planet use two systems. One counts the number of Martian days that have elapsed since the start of a particular mission and the other marks the location of Mars within its orbit .

Calendars for other worlds in our solar system get exceedingly difficult to calculate.

“On Jupiter, it would be hopeless,” Dr. Binzel said. “It’s a gas planet and different latitudes have different rotation periods. I think the Jovians would find themselves very confused.”

Then there’s Venus where a single rotation of the planet takes longer than its entire year (it also spins upside down). Luckily, Venus doesn’t have noticeable seasons, so you need not worry if your calendar doesn’t sync up with the year.

But there is one planet where the calendar would need zero finessing: Mercury. The small planet revolves exactly three times, or days, over the course of two years — allowing its calendar to naturally align every other year.

Many other planets orbiting stars throughout our galaxy. Astronomers suspect that plenty of closer exoplanets revolve exactly once every year. These planets show only one face to their star, leaving the other side in perpetual darkness. And while that might make life on those worlds difficult, their calendars would always be in sync.

But even if by some wild cosmic coincidence, a planet’s orbit could be evenly divided into days, it likely wouldn’t stay that way for long.

Earth’s spin, for example, is slowing over time. Eventually one year won’t last 365.2422 days but precisely 365 days, allowing us to drop the leap year — at least temporarily.

“You have to enjoy the leap year while it’s here,” said Konstantin Batygin, a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology. “Because in millions of years, maybe tens of millions of years, it’s just not going to be around anymore.”