Do you know that there was a year that lasted 445 days?
46 BCE was the longest year ever recorded, lasting 445 days, 80 days more than a usual year.
A year is defined by the Earth’s orbit around the Sun and our calendar system breaks this long period into smaller units like months, weeks and days to make it easier for us to recognize time.
Although, modern calendars are much more accurate at matching the Earth’s orbit and even include adjustments like “leap seconds,” older calendars were less effective in maintaining this synchronization.
Before Julius Caesar introduced the Julian calendar, the Roman calendar was quite different.
It had only four months (March, July, October and May) with 31 days each, while the other months had 29 days and February had 28 days.
This caused the calendar to drift out of sync with the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.
By the time this calendar was so inaccurate that a near-total eclipse, which actually occurred on March 14, was recorded as happening on July 11.
To fix the errors in the Roman calendar, an extra month called Mercedonius had to be added every few years.
The system of adding extra month to correct the calendar wasn’t very reliable as it could be exploited for political gain.
Considering this, Julius tried to fix the issues with the Roman calendar by introducing the Julian calendar.
He added extra days to the shorter month (except for February) to make the year 365 days long, to meet the actual length of the solar system.
