Coordinated Universal Time. Same as GMT or
Greenwich Mean Time. The two terms are often used loosely to refer to time kept on the Greenwich meridian (longitude zero), five hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time. UTC is the basis for the worldwide system of civil time. This time scale is kept by time laboratories around the world, including the U.S. Naval
Observatory, and is determined using highly precise atomic clocks. The International Bureau of Weights and Measures makes use of data from the timing laboratories to provide the international standard UTC which is accurate to approximately a nanosecond (billionth of a second) per day. The length of a UTC second is defined in terms of an atomic transition of the element
cesium under specific conditions, and is not directly related to any astronomical phenomena.
