Latest International Atomic Time Stories
An attempt to eliminate leap seconds and permanently change how time is measured has been postponed until 2015 by the International Telecommunications Union. ITU Radio-communication Assembly delegates on Thursday were unable to come to an agreement on whether to stop adding leap seconds to the world’s atomic clocks to keep them synchronized with Earth’s rotational cycles. The ITU will now spend the next three years conducting further studies “to ensure that all the technical...
For at least ten years experts have been debating the use of leap seconds, tiny bits of time added to calendars and clocks in hopes of reconciling the difference between atomic time used by computer systems and time as defined by measuring the Earth’s movement around the sun and its daily, but slightly slowing, rotation. Governments have been split on the issue but are expected to make a decision this week at a UN telecom meeting, says the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) on...
Researchers have found that an atomic clock at the U.K.'s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has the best long-term accuracy of any other clock in the world. Studies of the clock's accuracy show it is nearly twice as accurate as previously thought. The clock would lose or gain less than a second in about 138 million years. The NPL's CsF2 clock is a "caesium foundation" atomic clock, in which the "ticking" is provided by the measurement of the energy required to change a...
A team of physicists from the United States and Russia announced today* that it has developed a means for computing, with unprecedented accuracy, a tiny, temperature-dependent source of error in atomic clocks. Although small, the correction could represent a big step towards atomic timekeepers' longstanding goal of a clock with a precision equivalent to one second of error every 32 billion years"”longer than the age of the universe.Precision timekeeping is one of the bedrock technologies of...
The world's best caesium atomic clocks control Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), an atomic time scale on which the time zones used in everyday life are based. But also in navigation (GPS), astronomy, telecommunications, geodesy and physical fundamental research, accurate timing is of essential importance. Until recently, three of PTB's clocks belonged to the exclusive club of primary caesium atomic clocks. Now a fourth one, the caesium fountain clock CSF2, has joined in. This month, its data...
A British research scientist said a leap second would be tacked on to the end of 2008 to correct for eccentricities in the Earth's rotation. Peter Whibberley, a senior research scientist at Britain's National Physical Laboratory, said the world's official clock, the atomic Coordinated Universal Time, would recognize the extra second Wednesday night immediately before midnight, CNN reported. The difference between atomic time and Earth time has now built up to the point where it needs to be...
