Microseconds to Seconds (µs to s)
1 microsecond equals 0.000001 seconds exactly.
How to convert microseconds to seconds
To convert microseconds to seconds, multiply the number of microseconds by 0.000001. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply seconds by 1,000,000.
seconds = microseconds × 0.000001
Example: 10 microseconds = 0.00001 seconds.
Months and years are not constant. This site uses the average Gregorian year of 365.2425 days, so one 'year' converts to 365.2425 days, not 365; use 'common year' for exactly 365 days.
About these units
Microsecond (µs)
One millionth of a second. Used for electronics and processor timing.
Writing a microsecond takes a Greek letter, mu, which stands for the prefix micro-, one millionth. Where plain text cannot display it, people fall back on the letter u and write us. The unit belongs to electronics and radio: a signal that repeats every microsecond has a frequency of 1 MHz, and a radio wave of that period is about 300 m long.
A microsecond is one millionth of a second, short enough that light in a vacuum crosses only about 1 km in 3.34 of them. Digital audio lives on this scale, because a CD sample at 44.1 kHz lasts about 22.7 microseconds and a 48 kHz sample about 20.8. A modern solid-state drive has an access latency of about 50 microseconds, and a camera flash lasts around 1,000. Relativity matters at this scale too: GPS satellite clocks would drift by about 38 microseconds per day without compensation. Wikipedia notes that the 2011 Japanese earthquake shortened the day by about 1.8 microseconds.
1 microsecond = 0.000001 seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Microsecond; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition
Second (s)
The SI base unit of time, defined by the radiation frequency of the cesium-133 atom: 9,192,631,770 cycles per second.
Our word second is a leftover of Latin. Medieval scholars divided a degree, and later the hour, into 60 parts called pars minuta prima, the first small part, and divided those again into pars minuta secunda, the second small part. NIST traces the roots further back: Babylonian and Greek astronomers split the circle into 360 degrees, and around 150 C.E. Ptolemy split each degree into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds. Clocks that could show seconds appeared only in the later 16th century, and Christiaan Huygens's pendulum clock of 1656 was the first able to keep time accurately to the second.
For most of history the second was a fraction of a day, and in 1956 it was redefined as a fraction of the tropical year, a definition the SI took over in 1960. In 1967 the 13th CGPM switched to atoms: 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation tied to a hyperfine transition of caesium-133. The 2019 SI revision restated this by fixing the caesium frequency at 9,192,631,770 hertz. NIST reports that commercial caesium clocks stay within about a three-millionth of a second per year, and experimental clocks based on other atoms are roughly ten thousand times more precise.
The second is the reference unit for time on this site.
Sources: NIST: the second and the SI redefinition; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition; Wikipedia: Second
Related conversions
- Seconds to microseconds (reverse)
- Microseconds to minutes
- Microseconds to hours
- Microseconds to days
- Microseconds to weeks
- Microseconds to months
- Microseconds to years
- Microseconds to milliseconds
- Microseconds to nanoseconds
- Microseconds to decades
- Microseconds to centuries
- Microseconds to millennia
- Minutes to seconds
- Hours to seconds
- Days to seconds
- Weeks to seconds
- Months to seconds
- Years to seconds
- Milliseconds to seconds
- Nanoseconds to seconds
- Decades to seconds
- Centuries to seconds
- Millennia to seconds
- Picoseconds to seconds
See all time units.