answersLogoWhite

0

The earth doesn't go around the sun in an exact whole number of days. Over the centuries it took people a very long time to discover how to handle this (so that equinoxes, harvests, midsummer etc always come at the same date). The solution is to add a day every 4 years. Even that isn't exact, and this rule is not applied on certain occasions.

The rule, in the Gregorian calendar, is that years evenly divisible by 4 would be leap years, except that century years not evenly divisible by 400 would not be. This century year rule accounts for the small residual error of 3 days in 400 years that the original Julian calendar did not account for.

User Avatar

Wiki User

14y ago

What else can I help you with?