What is a leap year?

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A leap year is a year that has an extra day. The calendar as we know it has 365 days in a year. However, it actually takes the Earth 365 1/4 days to rotate around the sun. Those additional six hours may not seem like much, but if we didn't put another day in the calendar every few years, the calendar would no longer match up to the dates it was supposed to be tracking!

A man named Pope Gregory XIII came up with the concept of the leap year in 1582 because the calendar he had been using had been getting off track for centuries. It wasn't a big difference at first — it took 128 years to get off track by one day, and 400 years to get off track by three — but by the time Pope Gregory noticed something wrong, it was off by ten days! (Can you imagine celebrating your birthday ten days earlier than it actually was?) 

With the help of his astronomers, he decided that February, then a 29-day month, would become 28 days. In years divisible by four, February would get that day back in order to balance out all of those extra hours from those quarter-days of previous years. Centennial years divisible by 400 would be considered leap, which is why 1900 wasn't but 2000 was, and years not divisible by four would now be called "common years."

Do people born on February 29th only get to celebrate their birthday once every four years? Not quite! Even though a twelve-year-old born on February 29th might joke that they've only celebrated their third birthday, the calendar doesn't affect how old your body is! Instead, leap year birthdays in common years are celebrated on either February 28th or March 1st.  

Do people born on February 29th only get to celebrate their birthday once every four years? Not quite! Even though a twelve-year-old born on February 29th might joke that they've only celebrated their third birthday, the calendar doesn't affect how old your body is! Instead, leap year birthdays in common years are celebrated on either February 28th or March 1st.