The debate on how to measure time has been on the table for many years. Until now, the date and time systems are based on the Gregorian calendar, which is the most widely accepted in the world. It is a solar calendar based on the fact that a year has 365 days and distinguishes between Before Christ and After Christ. He is the one who states that we are now in the year 2022 (0 is the year of Jesus’ birth).

China was not convinced of this system and therefore they proposed a universal standard for measuring time throughout the solar system. Someone who is neither religious nor world-centered.

Problem. While it is easy to measure time on Earth, it is difficult to do so in space. Basically, according to our colleagues at Xataka in this article, it’s impossible to determine the exact time on Mars by synchronizing it with the time on Earth, since it takes between 3 and 22 minutes for a radio signal to travel from Earth to Mars. Not only that: the relative position and speed of the two planets are constantly changing. It also gets more complicated when we need to know the seconds very precisely.

That’s why scientists now use atomic clocks that use electron orbitals. They are so accurate that NASA’s Deep Space Atomic Clock is expected to shift one second every 10 million years.

Chinese solution. However, a group of Chinese scientists is determined to create a new standard for measuring time, a new calendar far from popular belief. This is what emerges from a study published in the Journal of Electronic Measurement and Instrumentation, in which top researchers from the China Aerospace Sciences and Technology Corporation, the Chinese Academy of Space Technologies, and the National Astronomical Observatories in China worked.

How? Suggesting the center instead of the world the solar system or “barycenter” as the origin of coordinates for determining positions in space. In this way, the beginning of time would be located at the moment when a selected signal from a millisecond pulsar, a highly magnetic neutron star vibrating hundreds of times per second, reached the barycenter.

The problem now is that the specific pulsar and signal must be chosen to mark the start time in this new calendar, the researchers wrote in this South China Morning Post article.

Difference. When our home planet is at the center of the coordinate system and the Greenwich meridian is the reference point, this is completely against the way we calculate time. And much less with the year 0 determined by the supposed birth of Jesus Christ. “The starting point of time used by the Gregorian calendar, which is commonly used today, has to do with religion. A new kind of time rule is needed beyond Earth,” the researchers said.

it’s an old discussion. This isn’t the first time scientists have considered the idea of ​​moving away from standard Earth-centered measurement. In fact, “astronomers already use such a system when examining signals from outside the solar system with high time precision or calculating the positions of planets,” said astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Recall that the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA) was created in 2004 to combine data from 19 pulsars to create a highly accurate time scale that can be used to detect gravitational waves. Also, new starting points for the calendar have been proposed in the past. In the 1990s, Italian-American scientist and historian Cesare Emiliani advocated the idea that the calendar should begin at the beginning of the Holocene epoch, that is, the current geological epoch in which we find ourselves.

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