To stay relevant in a highly digitalized world, the official standard time is ditching the leap second.
Governments worldwide have decided it’s too much of a hassle to keep adding leap seconds to official clocks. The practice, which has been in use since 1972, will be suspended for at least a century from 2035 onward in hopes of finding more elegant ways of syncing modern time-keeping methods with Earth’s rotation.
Two time standards are relevant here: Universal Time (UT or UT1) and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). UT1 reflects historical ways of timekeeping and is based on Earth’s rotation. More precisely, UT1 measures this rotation with respect to distant stars, since precise positional measurements of the sun are difficult. UTC, on the other hand, is based on the steady tick of atomic clocks.
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