Coinciding with the winter season in the Northern Hemisphere, the globe is expected to reach its closest distance to the sun, known as “perihelion”, at 19:17 Mecca time (16:17 GMT) tomorrow, Wednesday 4 January.
The distance between the Earth and the Sun changes every year
According to engineer Majed Abu Zahra, head of the Jeddah Astronomical Society, the distance between us and the sun It changes over the course of a year, because the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is elliptical and not circular, and at the point of perihelion the Earth is at a distance of 147,105,052 million km, which is a distance of about 5 million km closer to the Sun (the distance between the center of the Earth and the center of the Sun), than it will be It will take about 6 months from now when it reaches aphelion (farthest point from the sun) on July 4th at a distance of 152,098,455 km from the sun.
Abu Zahra added, during a post on the astronomical society page on the social network ‘Facebook’, that January’s perihelion and July’s aphelion is not a big difference in distance between them, but this difference in distance means that the disc of the sun will appear outward now, and slightly larger than its usual shape, in addition to that it will be 7% brighter, and yet it will not cause the ice to melt in the northern hemisphere, because the four seasons occur mainly due to the tilt of the Earth’s axis of rotation and not its proximity to or distance from the sun.
The North Pole tilts away from the sun in winter
And the head of the astronomical society explained that in winter the North Pole tends away from the sun, while it is tilted towards the sun in summer, and even if the Earth’s approach to the sun or after it is not the reason main for the occurrence of the seasons, affects how long those seasons last. When the Earth is close to the sun, it moves faster in its orbit and runs at a speed of about 30.3 kilometers per second, which is faster than the its speed in early July, and therefore the winter season in the northern hemisphere is the shortest of the four seasons.
And on January 1, 2023, the image of planet Earth appears, during which it is noted that the northern half is inclined relative to the sun, where winter season Now, the southern half is tilted towards the sun because it’s summer there.
