Perhaps you recently received a message on your cell phone or on social media about the aphelion that speaks of supposed impact of this on the temperature of the planet, with a greater risk of contracting diseasesit is very necessary that you know that those concepts are totally WRONG.
Aphelion: being farther from the Sun
First you need to remember that the earth moves around the sun in an orbit that is not a perfect circle but an ellipse, and the Sun is situated at one of the foci of this ellipse. It is easily deduced that every year in the return of our planet to the Sun There is a time when the Earth is the farthest from the Sun (between July 3 or 4), at that point it is called “aphelion”; clearly this position has an opposite which is when Earth is as close as possible to the king star (around January 4), at that it is called “perihelion”.
The FAKE message about aphelion
We leave you in the main image of the note, the screenshot of the cell phone with the message that unfortunately went viral quickly, We will deny each of the misconceptions in the following paragraphs. with which the creator of this tried to deceive several.
The title of the message says “Much colder from here (May when it started to go viral) to August” , and so it already starts badly from the title. If it refers only to the southern hemisphere we have to laugh out loud, because it is not telling us anything that the seasons of the year do not show us. But since what this message tries to do is generalize the concepts for the entire planet, you will quickly realize that if someone from the North Hemisphere and from one of the many countries that are currently going through fatal heat waves…, something already doesn’t work well on that text.
In the first paragraph it says “We will live the Aphelion phenomenon (aphelion), the Earth will be very far from the Sun. We will not see the phenomenon but we will feel its impact”. It is true that we will live the aphelionas it happens absolutely every year and there is nothing strange about that. The Earth will indeed be farther from the Sun at aphelion, but It is NOT true that this is a determining factor in the variations in the temperature of the globe.
Then he says that “The distance from the Earth to the Sun is 90 million km” This is a wrong data, we are actually 150 million kilometers as mean distance. He goes on to say that “… Aphelion takes us 152 million kilometers away from the Sun, that is, 66% farther.”And this too IT’S FALSE. At the moment of greatest Earth-Sun distance we are about 152 million kilometers (aphelion), while at the closest (perihelion) the Earth-Sun distance is approximately 147 million kilometers. Therefore, it follows very easily that the difference between these two extreme distances is only 3%, and not a brutal 66% as an exponent of the message full of fallacies.
understood this, the fact that the Earth is closer to the Sun (at aphelion or pehielion), does not differentially cool or heat our planet. And therefore, all the sentences of the FAKE message where reference is made to the low temperatures that we will have to face in the world until August, the new epidemics and respiratory diseases that will multiply, have nothing to do with aphelion.
The tilt of the earth’s axis gives us the seasons.
Going back to review the aphelion date (month of July), which is usually the 4th of July (particularly this year 2022 will be given on July 4 at 4:10 AM Argentine time), at that time the northern hemisphere responds to the summer season and it is due to the tilt of the earth’s axis of 23.5 °.
Therefore, the Earth has four seasons because of the tilt of its axis, not because of the distance-closeness of the Sun at aphelion-perihelion. When the north pole tilts towards the Sun, it is summer in the northern hemisphere, when the south pole tilts towards the Sun, it is the turn of the summer season in the southern hemisphere.
It should be noted that this change of seasons is not prominent or very relevant in tropical areas, where countries do not have seasons, but seasons.
Now that this matter of aphelion and its effects is cleared up, Let’s help stop this fake news that has become a snowball with very wrong conceptsI invite you to send the link of this note to those who forwarded the viral message to you on the networks or by WhatsApp, especially to those who believed it to be true and tried to help you by alerting you to something that did not really happen.
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