The precise system of time measurement used for all practical purposes. Formerly based on mean solar time, it has since 1972 been based on international atomic time, a uniform time derived from the frequencies of selected transitions within atoms.
It is a modern continuation of the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), i.e., the mean solar time on the meridian of Greenwich, England, which is the conventional 0-meridian for geographic longitude.Universal Time and standard time
Prior to the introduction of standard time, every municipality around the civilized world set its official clock, if it had one, according to the local position of the sun. Standard time, where all clocks in a large region are set to the same time, was established to solve this problem.
Standard time originally divided the world into twenty-four "time zones", each one covering exactly 15 degrees of longitude. However, political considerations have increased the number of standard time zones to 39. All clocks within each of these zones would be set to the same time as the others, but so as to differ by one hour from those in the neighbouring zones. The local time at the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Greenwich, England was chosen as standard at the 1884 International Meridian Conference, leading to the widespread use of Greenwich Mean Time in order to set local clocks. The conference rejected Sir Sandford Fleming's time zones because they were outside the purpose for which it was called, to choose a prime meridian. Nevertheless, by 1929 all major countries had adopted time zones.
In the United States and Canada, standard time zones were introduced on November 18 1883, by American and Canadian railroads. The American Railway Association, an organization of railroad managers, had noticed growing scientific interest in standardizing time. Most people simply accepted the new time, but a number of cities and counties refused to accept "railroad time", which, after all, had not been made law. In one Iowa Supreme Court case, the owner of a saloon argued that he operated by local (sun) time, not "railroad time," and so he had not violated laws about closing time. Standard time remained a local matter until 1918, when it was made law as part of the introduction of daylight saving.
On November 2, 1868 New Zealand officially adopted a standard time to be observed nationally, and was perhaps the first country to do so. It was based on the longitude 172° 30' East of Greenwich, that is 11 hours 30 minutes ahead of Greenwich Mean Time. This standard was known as New Zealand Mean Time.
Measurement
One can measure time based on the rotation of the Earth by observing celestial bodies crossing the meridian every day. Nowadays, UT in relation to International Atomic Time (TAI) is determined by Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observations of distant quasars, a method which has an accuracy of micro-seconds. Most sources of time and celestial coordinate system standards use UT1 as the default meaning of UT, though occasionally UTC may be implied. As UT is slightly irregular in its rate, astronomers introduced Ephemeris Time, which has since been replaced by Terrestrial Time (TT). However, because Universal Time is synchronous with night and day, and more precise atomic-frequency standards drift away from this, UT is still used to produce a correction called leap seconds to atomic time to obtain a broadcast form of civil time that carries atomic frequency. Thus, civil broadcast standards for time and frequency are a compromise that usually follows, with an offset found from the total of all leap seconds, International Atomic Time (TAI), but occasionally jumps in order to prevent it from drifting too far from mean solar time.
Barycentric Dynamical Time (TDB), a form of atomic time, is now used in the construction of the ephemerides of the planets and other solar system objects, for two main reasons. For one thing, these ephemerides are tied to optical and radar observations of planetary motion, and the TDB time scale is fitted so that Newton's laws of motion, with corrections for general relativity, are followed. For another, the time scales based on Earth's rotation are not uniform, so are not suitable for predicting the motion of solar system objects.
In 1928 the term Universal Time was adopted internationally as a more precise term than Greenwich Mean Time, because the GMT could refer to either an astronomical day starting at noon or a civil day starting at midnight. However, the term Greenwich Mean Time persists in common usage to this day in reference to civil timekeeping.
Versions
There are several versions of Universal Time:
UT0 is Universal Time determined at an observatory by observing the diurnal motion of stars or extragalactic radio sources, and also from ranging observations of the Moon and artificial Earth satellites. There are seasonal effects, and these can be mostly removed by applying a conventional correction: where t is the time as fraction of the Besselian year. UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) is the international standard on which civil time is based.
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