Fill in the blanks The distance between the sun and the Earth is least when the Earth is least when the Earth is at blank
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Answer:
At perihelion, the Earth’s closest distance to the Sun, the distance between the Sun and the Earth is 91.4 million miles. The Earth is closest to the Sun in early January. At aphelion, when the Earth is furthest to the Sun, the distance between them is about 94.5 million miles. The Earth is furthest from the Sun in early July.
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Explanation:
The sun is at the heart of the solar system. All of the bodies in the solar system — planets, asteroids, comets, etc. — revolve around it at various distances. Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, gets as close as 29 million miles (47 million kilometers) in its elliptical orbit, while objects in the Oort Cloud, the solar system's icy shell, are thought to lie as far as 9.3 trillion miles (15 trillion km). But what is the distance between Earth and the sun?
Earth orbits the sun 100,000 times closer than the Oort Cloud, at an average of 92,955,807 miles (149,597,870 km). The distance from Earth to the sun is called an astronomical unit, or AU, which is used to measure distances throughout the solar system.
Jupiter, for example, is 5.2 AU from the sun. Neptune is 30.07 AU from the sun. The distance to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is about 268,770 AU, according to NASA. However, to measure longer distances, astronomers use light-years, or the distance that light travels in a single Earth-year, which is equal to 63,239 AU. So Proxima Centauri is about 4.25 light-years away.
Related: How Big is Earth?
Related: What's the Speed of Earth Around the Sun?
Artists rendering of the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud.
Artists rendering of the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. (Image credit: NASA)
Elliptical orbit
The AU is the average distance from the Earth to the sun. Earth makes a complete revolution around the sun every 365.25 days — one year. However, Earth's orbit is not a perfect circle; it is shaped more like an oval, or an ellipse. Over the course of a year, Earth moves sometimes closer to the sun and sometimes farther away from the sun. Earth's closest approach to the sun, called perihelion, comes in early January and is about 91 million miles (146 million km), just shy of 1 AU. The farthest from the sun Earth gets is called aphelion. It comes in early July and is about 94.5 million miles (152 million km), just over 1 AU.
Finding the distance
Historically, the first person to measure the distance to the sun was the Greek astronomer Aristarchus around the year 250 B.C. He used the phases of the moon to measure the sizes and distances of the sun and moon. During a half moon, the three celestial bodies should form a right angle. By measuring the angle at Earth between the sun and moon, he determined the sun was 19 times as far from the planet as the moon, and thus 19 times as big. In fact, the sun is about 400 times larger than the moon.
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