Seconds to Nanoseconds (s to ns)
1 second equals 1,000,000,000 nanoseconds exactly.
How to convert seconds to nanoseconds
To convert seconds to nanoseconds, multiply the number of seconds by 1,000,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply nanoseconds by 1×10⁻⁹.
nanoseconds = seconds × 1,000,000,000
Example: 10 seconds = 10,000,000,000 nanoseconds.
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
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
Related conversions
- Nanoseconds 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 decades
- Seconds to centuries
- Seconds to millennia
- Seconds to picoseconds
- Minutes to nanoseconds
- Hours to nanoseconds
- Days to nanoseconds
- Weeks to nanoseconds
- Months to nanoseconds
- Years to nanoseconds
- Milliseconds to nanoseconds
- Microseconds to nanoseconds
- Decades to nanoseconds
- Centuries to nanoseconds
- Millennia to nanoseconds
See all time units.