Earth's orbit is an ellipse, not a perfect circle. Earth's distance from the Sun varies by about 3 million miles throughout the year. Earth's orbit's semimajor axis is approximately 93 million miles.

An illustration of the solar system and the planet's orbits around the sun When you're standing on Earth's surface, it's easy to forget that our planet is hurtling around the sun at more than 67,000 ...

The object, the latest “quasi-moon” detected by astronomers, could be with us for almost another 60 years. By Robin George Andrews The Earth stands alone in the solar system as a habitable world, as ...

Earth’s orbit around the Sun isn’t a perfect circle—it’s slightly elliptical. Each year, around July 2 or 3, Earth reaches its farthest point from the Sun, known as aphelion. Around January 2 or 3, ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

A Dec. 28, 2023, Facebook post (direct link, archive link) claims humanity's basic understanding of the solar system is flawed. "They say the sun is 400 times larger than the moon and that it only ...

Astronomers spotted a potential Earth-size rocky world orbiting a white dwarf, suggesting a future in which our planet outlives its star. By Jonathan O’Callaghan In six billion years the sun will ...

This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. (AP) — The winter solstice is Saturday, ...

We worked out how many trips each of the solar system's eight planets has taken around the sun over the past 4.6 billion years. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate ...

The Earth stands alone in the solar system as a habitable world, as far as we know. But that doesn’t mean we don’t get visitors, most often in the form of (usually harmless) asteroids. Some even ...