A Day Is Now Less Than 24 Hours On Planet Earth, Reveals New Study

Scientists have recently revealed that the planet Earth is now spinning faster than how it has been in the last half-century. This means that a day is now shorter than 24 hours on the planet Earth.

The previous year 2020 had 28 shortest days and this year 2021 is going to have even shorter days. According to the scientists, a day on Earth will be 0.05 milliseconds shorter than the usual 86,400 seconds that make up the 24 hours.

As per the calculation, the planet has been taking less than 24 hours to complete one rotation for as long as 50 years now. It has been reported that the shortest day on Earth was recorded on July 19, 2020.

Officially, it is the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) that calculates the length of a day. The exact speed of the Earth’s rotation is done by measuring the precise moments when a fixed star passes a certain location in the sky each day by IERS.

A leap second is added to the UTC in order to keep up the synchronization with the astronomical time, says National Institute of Standards and Technology. While there has been a change in the rotation speed of the planet, a debate is in progress about the need to subtract a second from time to reflect the change.