THE NEW YORK TIMES - [Research by Stephen Kane, an associate professor of planetary astrophysics, is featured in an article about Earth's orbit around the sun, as well as the orbits of neighboring exoplanets.]
In the wee hours of Sunday (2:47 a.m. Eastern time, to be exact), Earth will make its closest approach to the sun and reach a point in its orbit known as perihelion. Chilly as winter may feel in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re more than three million miles closer to our fiery star than we were in the dead of summer.
The change in distance occurs because our planet’s orbit is stretched into an ellipse — so Earth snuggles up to the Sun every January and dips farther out into the outer solar system every July, at a point known as aphelion.