2024 is a leap year: as has happened for more than two thousand years, all (or almost all) years expressed by a number divisible by “4” are leap years, meaning they have one extra day, 366 instead of 365. The extra day is added to the month of February, which thus has 29 days!
As is well known, the matter stems from the fact that the solar year is not exactly the same as the calendar year: the Earth actually takes a little more than 365 days to orbit the sun, so back in the time of Julius Caesar it was decided to add a day to February every 4 years in order to “align” the solar year with the civil calendar.
Even this correction, however, was not enough, since one extra day every 4 years corresponds to 6 hours a year, while the Earth's actual orbital period is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds: a difference of 11 minutes and 14 seconds which, over the centuries, added up to quite a few days, so much so that in 1581 Pope Gregory XIII promoted a reform of the calendar by introducing a new rule.
It was established that the number of leap years within a 400-year cycle should be reduced, by considering years that are multiples of 100 but not of 400 as not being leap years.
The fact remains that, since the time of Julius Caesar, leap years have had a bad reputation precisely because of that extra day in February, as February was considered by the Romans to be a particularly unpleasant month.
Even today people often say “leap year, year of misfortune!”
Then again, numerologists point out that 2024 is a truly remarkable number: if you take all the whole numbers from 2 to 9, raise each of them to the power of three, and add them all together, the result is exactly 2024, namely:
23 + 33 + 43 + 53 + 63 + 73 + 83 + 93
Numerologists say that this is such a curious and rare property that it suggests the year just begun will be a particularly interesting year… though we still don't know for certain whether that will be for better or for worse!