Math and Arithmetic

How many seconds are there in two years Different assumption different answer question?

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2008-08-26 04:27:01

There's several ways to approach the problem, depending on what

kind of year you're interested in. If it's a calendar year, then an

exact answer is possible: each day is 86,400 seconds and each year

is 365 days (except for a leap year, which is 366). This gives a

result of 63,072,000 seconds in two years, 63,158,400 if one of

them is a leap year: obviously both can't be leap years at the same

time. The calendar year is the year to watch if you're interested

in actual timekeeping. For example, if you start a timer at

midnight between December 31 and January 1 one year, and stop the

timer two years later, the above answer is the one you'd end up

with (though the timer would probably overflow by then). You could

also be interested in two years from an astronomical point of view:

how many seconds it takes for the Earth to make two complete

revolutions around the Sun. There's slight ambiguity in what we

mean by "complete revolution," but one common measure is the

sidereal year - a complete revolution from the point of view

of a hypotherical observer on a distant star. It is approximately

31,558,149.54 seconds long, making the length of two years slightly

over 63,116,299 seconds.
