Distant Sun

It probably doesn’t sound right on a hot summer day, but the Sun is actually farthest from us for the entire year this week — more than 94 million miles.

Earth’s orbit around the Sun is a little bit stretched out. The average distance to the Sun is about 93 million miles. But during the year, the Earth-Sun distance varies by about three percent.

That slight variation is known as the “eccentricity” of Earth’s orbit. The orbits of all the planets are eccentric, but by varying amounts. Venus’s orbit is the least eccentric — less than one percent –– while Mercury’s is the greatest, at about 20 percent.

In fact, it’s almost impossible for one body to have a perfectly circular orbit around another. Earth and the other planets are pushed and pulled by the gravity of all the other planets. And powerful collisions with other bodies have also skewed their orbits.

As Earth’s distance from the Sun changes, so does the amount of energy we receive from the Sun. At our closest, in early January,