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Earth-based: the day is based on the time it takes for the Earth to rotate on its own axis, as observed on a sundial [citation needed]. Units originally derived from this base include the week (seven days), and the fortnight (14 days). Subdivisions of the day include the hour (1/24 of a day), which is further subdivided into minutes and seconds ...
The second (symbol: s) is a unit of time, historically defined as 1 ⁄ 86400 of a day – this factor derived from the division of the day first into 24 hours, then to 60 minutes and finally to 60 seconds each (24 × 60 × 60 = 86400). The current and formal definition in the International System of Units (SI) is more precise:
1.67 minutes (or 1 minute 40 seconds) 10 3: kilosecond: 1 000: 16.7 minutes (or 16 minutes and 40 seconds) 10 6: megasecond: 1 000 000: 11.6 days (or 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds) 10 9: gigasecond: 1 000 000 000: 31.7 years (or 31 years, 252 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes, 40 seconds, assuming that there are 7 leap years in the interval)
It has since been set backward 8 times and forward 17 times. The farthest time from midnight was 17 minutes in 1991, and the nearest is 90 seconds, set in January 2023. The Clock was moved to 150 seconds (2 minutes, 30 seconds) in 2017, then forward to 2 minutes to midnight in January 2018, and left unchanged in 2019. [5]
Fractional days are often calculated in UTC or TT, although Julian Dates use pre-1925 astronomical date/time (each date began at noon = ".0") and Microsoft Excel uses the local time zone of the computer. Using fractional days reduces the number of units in time calculations from four (days, hours, minutes, seconds) to just one (days).
More exactly, the mean solar day is 86.400 002 ks due to tidal braking, and increasing at the rate of approximately 2 ms/century; to correct for this time standards like UTC use leap seconds with the interval described as "a day" on them being most often 86.4 ks exactly by definition but occasionally one second more or less so that every day ...
A minute (min) is 60 seconds in length (or, rarely, 59 or 61 seconds when leap seconds are employed), and an hour is 60 minutes or 3600 seconds in length. A day is usually 24 hours or 86,400 seconds in length; however, the duration of a calendar day can vary due to Daylight saving time and Leap seconds .
The quotient is the number of days since the epoch, and the modulus is the number of seconds since midnight UTC on that day. If given a Unix time number that is ambiguous due to a positive leap second, this algorithm interprets it as the time just after midnight. It never generates a time that is during a leap second.