Time and date systems are central components for modern civilization. Many of us are familiar with the Gregorian calendar, which is the most widely accepted civil calendar in the world.
It is a solar calendar based on a 365-day year, and makes a distinction between BC and AD, with the birth of Jesus Christ.
Timekeeping gets more complicated than that, though, when we need to keep seconds extremely accurately.
Today scientists use atomic clocks to do this, which basically make use of electron orbits to keep us in time so accurately that NASA’s Deep Space Atomic Clock is expected to be off by one second just once every 10 million years.
This is particularly important for space travel, when navigators must send a signal to a spacecraft that is then returned to Earth. The duration of that two-way journey tell us how far away the spacecraft is.
This requires very accurate time-keeping. A measurement that is off by even one thousandth of a second would lead to a distance error of around 185 miles, according to NASA.
However, it gets even more complicated when attempting to sync time between multiple planets because their relative positions are constantly changing, the Chinese scientists say.
To get around this, they have suggested a timekeeping mechanism that would use the solar system’s center of mass as the origin of coordinates to determine locations in space, rather than the Earth, according to the South China Morning Post which has accessed their study.
The researchers also say the beginning of time could be defined as when a signal from a pulsar—rapidly spinning stars that emit signals at regular intervals and have been considered to be even more accurate than atomic clocks—reaches this center of mass.
In contrast, “the starting point of time used by the Gregorian calendar that is generally used now is related to religion,” the study authors say, the South China Morning Post reports.
The study was reportedly published in China’s peer-reviewed Journal of Electronic Measurement and Instrumentation last month, which Newsweek has not been able to access.
Astronomers have studied pulsars for timekeeping for years.
The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA) was formed in 2004 with the purpose of combining data from 19 pulsars in order to create an extremely specific timescale that could be used to detect gravitational waves.
The idea is that gravitational waves from extremely high-energy events elsewhere in the cosmos could subtly influence this timescale data in a way that could be detected.
It’s also not the first time a new start point to the calendar has been suggested.
Italian-American scientist and historian Cesare Emiliani suggested in the 1990s that the calendar should begin at the start of the Holocene epoch, which is the current geological era we are in.
