·Is the distance from the Earth to the Sun changing?

Question

·Is the distance from the Earth to the Sun changing?

Answer 1

The earth travels around the sun in an ellipse, so it is closest to the sun at one part of the year (January) and furthest from the sun six months later (July). But this is only a small effect. The average distance is not changing.

Answer 2

  The earth is in a stable orbit around the sun and it won't likely change much until the expanding sun vaporizes our planet.

Answer 3

First I should say that the Earth's orbit around the Sun is elliptical, not perfectly circular, so the Earth-Sun distance is changing as we speak just from the Earth traveling in its orbit around the Sun. See here for a discussion of that.

Is the orbit itself changing? Well, there are some long-period oscillations, but those are very small, and don't imply that we're systematically moving towards or away from the Sun.

There is an effect which is making us move very slowly away from the Sun. That is the tidal interaction between the Sun and the Earth. This slows down the rotation of the Sun, and pushes the Earth farther away from the Sun. You can read about tides, as they relate to the Earth-Moon system here. The principle for the Sun-Earth system should be the same. But how big of an effect is this? It turns out that the yearly increase in the distance between the Earth and the Sun from this effect is only about one micrometer (a millionth of a meter, or a ten thousandth of a centimeter). So this is a *very* tiny effect.

There is another effect which is also small, but somewhat bigger than the tidal effect. The Sun is powered by nuclear fusion, which means the Sun is continuously transforming a small part of its mass into energy. As the mass of the Sun goes down, our orbit gets proportionally bigger. However, over the entire main sequence lifetime of the Sun (about 10 billion years), the Sun will only lose about 0.1% of its mass, which means that the Earth should move out by just ~150,000 km (small compared to the total Earth-Sun distance of ~150,000,000 km). If we assume that the Sun's rate of nuclear fusion today is the same as the average rate over those 10 billion years (a bold assumption, but it should give us a rough idea of the answer), then we're moving away from the Sun at the rate of ~1.5 cm (less than an inch) a year. I probably don't even need to mention that this is so small that we don't have to worry about freezing.  

Answer 4

no  

Answer 5

Yes, constantly. The Earth's distance from the sun varies with the seasons by several million miles. We are closest to the sun in January. The seasons are caused by the Earth's axial tilt, and not by our distance from the sun.

Answer 6

nope

Answer 7

The Earth's orbit is elliptical!

Aphelion 152,097,701 km.

Perihelion 147,098,074 km.

Answer 8

it does,a bit.