The Earth at Perihelion

The Earth will reach its closest point to the Sun on January 2, 2021, at 13:51 GMT. This is called perihelion — from the Greek “peri” (near) and “helios” (the Sun). At this point, our planet passes within 147,093,162 km of the Sun. In contrast, at its most distant point — aphelion — it will be on July 5, 2021, at 152,100,533 km. In other words, at the perihelion in January, the Earth is roughly 5 million km closer to the Sun than in July.

So there’s no big distance difference between the perihelion and the aphelion. The Earth’s orbit is very nearly circular. Thus it’s not a distance from the Sun, but the tilt of our planet’s axis creates winter and summer on the earth.

Though it doesn’t correlate with the seasons, Earth’s closest and farthest points to the Sun actually affect seasonal lengths. When the Earth comes closest to the Sun for the year (like now), our planet is moving fastest in its orbit around the Sun. The Earth is rushing along now at almost 30 km/sec and moving about one kilometer per second faster than when the Earth is farthest from the Sun in early July. Thus the Northern Hemisphere winter and the Southern Hemisphere summer are the shortest seasons as the Earth rushes from the solstice in December to the equinox in March.

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