Seconds to Tun (Maya) (s to tun)

1 second equals 3.215020576×10⁻⁸ tun (Maya) (rounded).

1 second = 3.215020576×10⁻⁸ tun (Maya)

How to convert seconds to tun (Maya)

To convert seconds to tun (Maya), multiply the number of seconds by 3.215020576×10⁻⁸. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply tun (Maya) by 31,104,000.

tun (Maya) = seconds × 3.215020576×10⁻⁸

Example: 10 seconds = 3.215020576×10⁻⁷ tun (Maya).

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)

Metric (SI)Current unit

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

Tun (Maya) (tun)

MayaHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

18 winals or 360 days, the Maya 'year' of the Long Count.

Eighteen winals, or 360 days, make a tun. Scholars often call it the Long Count year, but it is five days shorter than the 365-day civil year, the haabʼ, and about five and a quarter days shorter than the tropical year of roughly 365.24 days. The tun therefore drifts away from the seasons, and the Maya tracked the solar year separately with the haabʼ.

The tun is the third position from the right in a written Long Count date. Its choice of 18 winals is the reason the system is not purely base-20: a strict base-20 count would have given 400 days at this step. The rounded 360-day figure is close to a year while staying a multiple of 20, which suited arithmetic on 20-day units.

The tun is the building block of the longer cycles. Twenty tuns form a katun, and rulers and events were frequently dated by how many tuns had passed. In seconds it equals 31,104,000, about 0.99 of a modern calendar year.

1 tun (Maya) = 31,104,000 seconds (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Maya calendar; Wikipedia: Mesoamerican Long Count calendar; Steve Morse: Mayan Calendar Rules

Related conversions

See all time units.