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Am I right to assume Kepler's 1st law of motion states the sun lies at one focus of an ellipse rather than between it's two foci?
I'm giving a talk about this & the info I got off Wikipedia gives a diagram of the sun at one of two foci. Surely the sun lies between the two foci because if it were off centre earthlings would experience hotter summers in the Northern (or perhaps southern) hemisphere. But surely they average out as the same. I appreciate summer & winter are down to axial tilt of the earth but is it true that in one year the earth only gets closest once rather than twice i.e. if the sun were between the 2 foci?
3 Answers
- ?Lv 77 years agoFavorite Answer
The sun lies at one of the Earths ellipse focal points. The Earth is in fact closest to the Sun around January 3rd ( 91.5 million miles) and farthest on July 4th (94.4 million miles).The Earths orbit is nearly circular,
- Andrew SmithLv 77 years ago
Kepler is right. The sun is at one focus point within the ellipse.
And yes, it is at the closest point just once in the year.
The amount of eccentricity is small.
Perhaps the effects are measurable. Yet there are so many other factors:- proximity to the ocean and the ocean currents, the size of landmasses etc- that they are masked by these.
