Earth, the Sun and a bike wheel: why your high-school textbook was wrong about the shape of Earth’s orbit

By Stephen Hughes, Honorary Senior Lecturer, School of Mathematics and Physics & UQ College, The University of Queensland

If you’ve ever been taught about how Earth orbits around the Sun, you might well think our planet travels along an oval-shaped path that brings it much closer to the Sun at some times of the year than at others. You’d have a good reason to think that, too: it’s how most textbooks show things.

Indeed, many people assume Earth is closer to the Sun in summer than in winter. As it happens, this is true during summer in the southern hemisphere, but it can’t also be true for summer in the northern hemisphere.

In the southern hemisphere, Earth is 5 million kilometres closer to…

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