This New Year you and your friends will hold your drinks up a second longer to usher in 2009. This will happen because an extra second will be added to atomic clocks all around the world by the timekeepers.

This “leap second” as they called it, needs to be added because today’s clocks have become so accurate that they revealed that the Earth's rotation can take slightly longer or shorter than 24 hours. The introduction of the “leap second” was announced by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) and the reason why they do it is to keep the internationally defined time and the Earth's pace synchronized.

According to Peter Whibberley, a senior research scientist at Britain's National Physical Laboratory, the difference between atomic time and Earth time needs to be corrected which means revelers will have an extra second to celebrate, CNN reported.

Until about 40 years ago, time has been based on the passage of the Sun across the sky. However, since 1967, the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) which is way more accurate has been introduced as the world’s official clock.

However, Earth is not as reliable as the UTC (very useful for smooth running of GPS and the Internet). Earth does not always rotate at a constant speed, it can wobble and the length of a day can be altered by events such as a big volcano eruption, an earthquake or very bad weather.

Therefore, the introduction of a “leap second” every now and then is a logical move in order to keep the atomic time and the astronomical time synchronized.