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  • 2022-02-23 (xsd:date)
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  • Is the 'Aphelion Phenomenon' Causing More Sickness on Earth? (en)
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  • In February 2022, a piece of text was copied and pasted across Facebook claiming that the aphelion phenomenon would bring colder than normal weather and cause more sickness, including a new wave of COVID-19. While aphelion truly refers to the furthest distance between an orbiting body and a primary body (in this case the Earth and the sun), the claim that this will cause abnormally cold weather and more sickness is false. Furthermore, the dates mentioned in this post are inaccurate. While this February 2022 text claims that the aphelion will start tomorrow, in reality the aphelion won't take place until July this year, and the math is off by millions of miles. While it may seem logical to believe that the Earth is coldest when it is furthest from the sun, that's not actually the case. The Earth is actually further from the sun in July and closer to the sun in January. The tilt of the Earth, not the varying distance from the sun, has a much larger impact on temperatures and the changing of seasons. As Space.com explains: This viral copypasta gets some other basic facts wrong about the Earth's orbit. In addition to incorrectly stating when the aphelion occurs, it claims that the Earth is 5 light minutes or 90,000,000 kilometers (about 56 million miles) away from the sun. This is wrong. On average, the Earth is about 93 million miles (about 150 million kilometers) away from the sun, or a little more than 8 light-minutes. As the earth's orbit is elliptical, the distance between the Earth and the sun varies throughout the year. During the perihelion, the closet point between the Earth and the sun, the planets are separated by about 91.5 million miles. At the aphelion, the earth is about 3 million miles further away. This is about a 7% difference, not 66% as claimed in this post. The Planetarium at the University of Southern Maine explains that this 3 million-mile difference is not enough to impact temperatures: Nothing. Well, in the case above, some social media users are attempting to mystify an annual occurrence in order to create skepticism over a pandemic that has resulted in close to 6 million deaths around the world. The pandemic is unrelated to the orbits of the Earth and the sun. (en)
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