New Year Eve's party just got a bit longer, all thanks to this reason!

Los Angeles : All those who are desperately waiting for the New Year will have to wait a little more.

The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service in France is responsible for the tracking of Earth's rotation. They announced that there is a need for a leap second to compensate for a slowdown in the Earth’s rotation.

For those who don’t know, a leap second is a one-second adjustment that is occasionally applied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in order to keep its time of day close to the mean solar time, or UT1.

2017 will be momentarily delayed as an extra second will occur as clocks strike midnight and a time of 23:59:60 will be recorded.

Last time, a similar leap second was added in June 2015 and this will be the 27th time it has occurred.

According to observers, the need for the change is because standard time lags behind atomic clocks.

A senior research scientist Peter Whibberley from UK said: "Atomic clocks are more than a million times better at keeping time than the rotation of the Earth, which fluctuates unpredictably. Leap seconds are needed to prevent civil time drifting away from Earth time. Although the drift is small - taking around 1,000 years to accumulate a one-hour difference - if not corrected it would eventually result in clocks showing midday before sunrise."

 

Some believe that the atomic clocks use the change of electron energy levels to tell the time and the time created by the clocks is used in GPS location devices and is used to control the wave frequency of television broadcasts.