An advance of 1.59 milliseconde which leaves scientists for speechless. This Tuesday, planet earth completed its daily rotation faster than usual, reports Le Figaro.
However, it is documented that our planet has, on a geological time scale, rather tendency to slow down: two billion years ago, when life was just starting to emerge on the blue planet, a day lasted 20 hours. And in 200 million years, it will make 25 hours, predict scientists.
Required seconds
These tiny variations in the duration of days are well understood and measured since the 1960s and the invention of atomic clocks. Thus, since 1967, a few 27 intercalaire seconds have had to be added to compensate for this slowdown and avoid an inexorable drift between the two time accounts, continues Le Figaro.
And if it is not the first time that our planet has played sprinters, with a speed record recorded in 2020, this new trend for acceleration continues. A part of “these faster days” can be explained in particular by variations in moon positions, which changes the distribution of masses on earth and therefore its speed of rotation.
But “ocean and atmospheric models are no longer enough to explain the acceleration observed since 2020,” said Figaro The astronomer Christian Bizouard.
And this, if it were to last, will soon require to remove a second from our clocks to stay aligned with solar time. This “negative second interlayer”, which would be a first in history, also gives white hair to the computer scientists and managers of satellite networks in particular, worried about possible bugs that this forced backwards could cause.
The researchers try to understand why the earth suddenly begins to hurry and advance several tracks: cast iron of ice cream, earthquakes or movements of the terrestrial nucleus are being studied.