Ever wondered who celebrates New Year's first or last? How many different New Year’s Eve countdowns there are around the world? When astronauts celebrate? Well you can get all of those answers today, keep on reading to learn all about these New Year’s math fun facts!
Sharing these fun facts with your students will help them not just get excited about the New Year but also about math, and remind them, or possibly inform them for the first time, that math is fun!
At the beginning of this month, when you and your families celebrated the changing of the year it was determined by precisely where you live. Which may lead you questioning: How many different New Year’s Eve countdowns are there around the world? - To answer this question, we have to look at times zones.
As you know, the time in Los Angeles is not the same as the time in Houston, or the times in Moscow or Beijing. Of course, this can be attributed to these cities being located in separate time zones. And, is why each celebrates the new year at different times.
So how many New Year’s countdowns are there exactly? Maybe more than you’d guess, there are 40 different countdowns to the new year!
Now that we’ve got the details about how many New Year’s countdowns there are, it’s time for another fun fact: what time is it in space? Meaning, if you were an astronaut in space, how would you set your watch?
Astronauts witness sunrises and sunset about every 90 minutes - which means they speed through each 1 hour time zone in less than 4 minutes. Any time zone would have been appropriate for space travel, but the most logical choice was the UTC - which is the same time zone that hosts the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. This may seem like an odd choice, but for centuries the Royal Observatory has been a renowned center for time-keep, and was therefore a natural choice for a universal reference - EVEN IN SPACE!
