Today the Earth is moving slower

This Friday, the Earth will move more slowly than the rest of the year, as it will be at aphelion, or the furthest point of its orbit around the Sun, recalled Alfred Rosenberg of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) this Thursday.

The Earth passes through aphelion every year, which is obvious, points out Alfred Rosenberg, who adds in a press release that to complete an orbit of about 940 million kilometers, the planet passes on average at a speed of about 30 kilometers per second. The Earth’s orbit around the Sun is not circular, so sometimes it moves slower and sometimes slower, and once a year, on January 3 in the case of 2023, it is at perihelion or minimum distance, about 147 million kilometers, and on Friday the distance between the planet and the Sun will be about 152 million kilometers.

Alfred Rosenberg explains that Kepler’s second law states that the Earth will move slower when you are farther from the Sun, and faster when it is closer. And he adds that the speeds can be determined at both ends of the orbit, so on Friday the Earth will be moving at just over 29 km/s, 1 km/s slower than it was moving on December 3 last year. January.

To compare this distance, he stated that it would be equivalent to covering the distance between Madrid and Barcelona (or the distance between Graciosa and El Hierro, about 500 km in both cases) in 17 seconds.

It takes half a second longer to cover this distance at aphelion than at perihelion, and he notes that a curious effect of this difference in speed is that summer in the northern hemisphere lasts about 5 days longer than winter.

Based on this data, Alfred Rosenberg says it can be concluded that the Earth’s orbit is quite close to a circle, adding that in the case of a more extreme planet like Mercury, it suffers from a much more noticeable variation: aphelion at 70 million kilometers, to perihelion at 46 million kilometers.