Nanoseconds to Seconds (ns to s)
1 nanosecond equals 1×10⁻⁹ seconds exactly.
How to convert nanoseconds to seconds
To convert nanoseconds to seconds, multiply the number of nanoseconds by 1×10⁻⁹. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply seconds by 1,000,000,000.
seconds = nanoseconds × 1×10⁻⁹
Example: 10 nanoseconds = 1×10⁻⁸ 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
Nanosecond (ns)
One billionth of a second. Light travels about 30 cm in a nanosecond.
Few units are as easy to picture as the nanosecond, because light makes it concrete. In a vacuum, light needs about 3.34 nanoseconds to travel one metre and about 1.02 nanoseconds to travel one foot. That is why engineers talk about wire lengths and signal delays in the same breath once clocks reach the gigahertz range, where the cycle time of a 1 GHz signal is exactly one nanosecond.
A nanosecond is one billionth of a second, and the ratio is hard to grasp: one nanosecond is to one second as one second is to about 31.7 years. It is the natural unit of fast digital hardware. A 74HC-series logic chip common in the mid-1980s had a typical propagation delay of about 8 ns, and the gap between packets on Gigabit Ethernet is 96 ns. The Go language's time package offers 1 ns precision.
1 nanosecond = 1×10⁻⁹ seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Nanosecond; 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 nanoseconds (reverse)
- Nanoseconds to minutes
- Nanoseconds to hours
- Nanoseconds to days
- Nanoseconds to weeks
- Nanoseconds to months
- Nanoseconds to years
- Nanoseconds to milliseconds
- Nanoseconds to microseconds
- Nanoseconds to decades
- Nanoseconds to centuries
- Nanoseconds to millennia
- Minutes to seconds
- Hours to seconds
- Days to seconds
- Weeks to seconds
- Months to seconds
- Years to seconds
- Milliseconds to seconds
- Microseconds to seconds
- Decades to seconds
- Centuries to seconds
- Millennia to seconds
- Picoseconds to seconds
See all time units.