Imagine you ask someone how old they are, and they say they are 8 years old—yet their appearance says otherwise. This person looks like an adult somewhere in their 30s, especially with the presence of tattoos and the lines on their faces that reflect the harsh struggles of life. Believe it or not, this is real and applies to people who are born in Leap Years. A leap year is a year every 4 years when there is an extra day in February, in which rather than having 28 days in February, we have 29 days.

So, why do we even have a leap year? To dive deeper into this, we have to get a little scientific. Mostly everyone in the world knows that the planet Earth takes about 365 days to orbit around the sun. However, this is incorrect. The actual orbit is beyond 365 days—it takes 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 56 seconds to orbit. This results in a leap year because every year, the calendar humans often use—the Gregorian Calendar—will start to sync out of place and slowly drift. This is why we have leap years. This extra day during the leap year, which is on February 29, actually helps sync our calendar back with our orbit so that we don’t experience winter earlier than usual, like in mid-October rather than December.

In conclusion, leap day is not only an essential part of our calendar system but it’s also extremely fascinating. It keeps our way of keeping time aligned with our Earth’s orbit so that it can be accurate and in sync, preventing significant changes in the world’s seasonal experiences. So the next time someone tells you they are 8 years old but look like they are in their 30s, you can easily assume they were born in a leap year.