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A leap second is a one-second adjustment that is occasionally applied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in order to keep its time of day close to the mean solar time, or UT1. Without such a correction, time reckoned by Earth's rotation drifts away from atomic time because of irregularities in the Earth's rate of rotation. Since this system of correction was implemented in 1972, 26 leap seconds have been inserted, the most recent on June 30, 2015 at 23:59:60 UTC. The UTC time standard, which is widely used for international timekeeping and as the reference for civil time in most countries, uses the international system (SI) definition of the second, based on atomic clocks. Like most time standards, UTC defines a grouping of seconds into minutes, hours, days, months, and years. However, the duration of one mean solar day is now slightly longer than 24 hours (86400 SI seconds) because the rotation of the Earth has slowed down. Therefore, if the UTC day were defined as precisely 86400 SI seconds, the UTC time-of-day would slowly drift apart from that of solar-based standards, such as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and its successor UT1. The purpose of a leap second is to compensate for this drift, by occasionally scheduling some UTC days with 86401 or (in principle) 86399 SI seconds. Specifically, a positive leap second is inserted between second 23:59:59 of a chosen UTC calendar date (the last day of a month, usually June 30 or December 31) and second 00:00:00 of the following date. This extra second is displayed on UTC clocks as 23:59:60. On clocks that display local time tied to UTC, the leap second may be inserted at the end of some other hour (or half-hour or quarter-hour), depending on the local time zone. A negative leap second would suppress second 23:59:59 of the last day of a chosen month, so that second 23:59:58 of that date would be followed immediately by second 00:00:00 of the following date. However, negative leap seconds have never been needed since the UTC standard was established, and are highly unlikely to ever be. Because the Earth's rotation speed varies in response to climatic and geological events, UTC leap seconds are irregularly spaced and unpredictable. Insertion of each UTC leap second is usually decided about six months in advance by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS), when needed to ensure that the difference between the UTC and UT1 readings will never exceed 0.9 seconds. 26 positive leap seconds have been scheduled so far.〔 ==History== About 140 AD, Ptolemy, the Alexandrian astronomer, sexagesimally subdivided both the mean solar day and the true solar day to at least six places after the sexagesimal point, and he used simple fractions of both the equinoctial hour and the seasonal hour, none of which resemble the modern second. Muslim scholars, including al-Biruni in 1000, subdivided the mean solar day into 24 equinoctial hours, each of which was subdivided sexagesimally, that is into the units of minute, second, third, fourth and fifth, creating the modern second as of the mean solar day in the process.〔 Used for mean new moons, both in Hebrew calendar cycles and in equivalent astronomical cycles.〕 With this definition, the second was proposed in 1874 as the base unit of time in the CGS system of units. Soon afterwards Simon Newcomb and others discovered that Earth's rotation period varied irregularly, so in 1952, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) defined the second as a fraction of the sidereal year. Because the tropical year was considered more fundamental than the sidereal year, in 1955, the IAU redefined the second as the fraction of the 1900.0 mean tropical year, which was adopted in 1956 by the International Committee for Weights and Measures and in 1960 by the General Conference on Weights and Measures, becoming a part of the International System of Units (SI). Eventually, this definition too was found to be inadequate for precise time measurements, so in 1967, the SI second was again redefined as 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation emitted by a caesium-133 atom in the transition between the two hyperfine levels of its ground state.〔(【引用サイトリンク】publisher=Time Service Department, United States Naval Observatory )〕 That value agreed to 1 part in 1010 with the astronomical (ephemeris) second then in use.〔Wm Markowitz (1988) 'Comparisons of ET (Solar), ET (Lunar), UT and TDT', in (eds.) A K Babcock & G A Wilkins, 'The Earth's Rotation and Reference Frames for Geodesy and Geophysics', IAU Symposia #128 (1988), at pp 413–418.〕 It was also close to of the mean solar day as averaged between years 1750 and 1892. However, for the past several centuries, the length of the mean solar day has been increasing by about 1.4–1.7 ms per century, depending on the averaging time.〔DD McCarthy and AK Babcock (1986), "The Length of the Day Since 1658", Phys. Earth Planet Inter., No. 44, pp. 281-292〕〔RA Nelson, DD McCarthy, S Malys, J Levine, B Guinot, HF Fliegel, RL Beard, and TR Bartholomew, (2001) "The Leap Second: its History and Possible Future" (2001), Metrologia 38, pp 509-529〕 By 1961, the mean solar day was already a millisecond or two longer than 86,400 SI seconds. Therefore, time standards that change the date after precisely 86,400 SI seconds, such as the International Atomic Time (TAI), will get increasingly ahead of time standards tied to the mean solar day, such as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). When the Coordinated Universal Time standard was instituted in 1961, based on atomic clocks, it was felt necessary to maintain agreement with the GMT time of day, which, until then, had been the reference for broadcast time services. Thus, from 1961 to 1971, the rate of (some) atomic clocks was constantly slowed to remain synchronised with GMT. During that period, therefore, the "seconds" of broadcast services were actually slightly longer than the SI second and closer to the GMT seconds. In 1972, the leap-second system was introduced so that the broadcast UTC seconds could be made exactly equal to the standard SI second, while still maintaining the UTC time of day and changes of UTC date synchronized with those of UT1 (the solar time standard that superseded GMT).〔 By then, the UTC clock was already 10 seconds behind TAI, which had been synchronized with UT1 in 1958, but had been counting true SI seconds since then. After 1972, both clocks have been ticking in SI seconds, so the difference between their readouts at any time is 10 seconds plus the total number of leap seconds that have been applied to UTC (36 seconds in July 2015). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Leap second」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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