Seconds to Aeons (s to Gyr)
1 second equals 3.168873851×10⁻¹⁷ aeons (rounded).
How to convert seconds to aeons
To convert seconds to aeons, multiply the number of seconds by 3.168873851×10⁻¹⁷. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply aeons by 3.1556952×10¹⁶.
aeons = seconds × 3.168873851×10⁻¹⁷
Example: 10 seconds = 3.168873851×10⁻¹⁶ aeons.
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
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
Aeon (Gyr)
One billion years. The Earth is about 4.5 aeons old.
Aeon comes from a Greek word meaning life, vital force, or an age, and its Latin cousin aevum lies behind English words such as eternal and medieval. In ordinary speech it means any very long, indefinite stretch. Philosophical and religious traditions use it differently, with Buddhist and Hindu texts sometimes rendering kalpa as aeon and Gnostic writers using it for divine emanations.
Astronomers fix a definite size, defining an aeon as a billion years. The figure used here is therefore 10 to the power of 9 Gregorian years, about 3.16 times 10 to the power of 16 seconds, which is a convention rather than a measured length. Geologists use the closely related spelling eon for the largest divisions of Earth's history, namely the Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic and Phanerozoic, and these are not billion-year blocks, since the Phanerozoic covers only about 538.8 million years. With Earth about 4.54 billion years old, it is roughly 4.5 aeons old.
1 aeon = 3.1556952×10¹⁶ seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Aeon; Wikipedia: Geologic time scale
Related conversions
- Aeons to seconds (reverse)
- Seconds to minutes
- Seconds to hours
- Seconds to days
- Seconds to weeks
- Seconds to months
- Seconds to years
- Seconds to milliseconds
- Seconds to microseconds
- Seconds to nanoseconds
- Seconds to decades
- Seconds to centuries
- Seconds to millennia
- Minutes to aeons
- Hours to aeons
- Days to aeons
- Weeks to aeons
- Months to aeons
- Years to aeons
See all time units.