EVERYDAY SCIENCE

Detailed explanation-1: -We call the shape of the Earth’s orbit, elliptical. This means it is shaped like an ellipse. An ellipse is a circle which has been squashed or flattened a bit. All 8 planets in our Solar System travel around the Sun in elliptical orbits.

Detailed explanation-2: -All planets move in elliptical orbits, with the sun at one focus. This is one of Kepler’s laws. The elliptical shape of the orbit is a result of the inverse square force of gravity.

Detailed explanation-3: -Orbits are eliptical because of Newtons Law of Gravity (bodies attract each other in proportion to their mass and inversly proportional to the square of the distance between them). All worked out by Kepler some years ago. A circular orbit is a special (and very unlikely) case of an eliptical orbit.

Detailed explanation-4: -All orbits are elliptical, which means they are an ellipse, similar to an oval. For the planets, the orbits are almost circular. The orbits of comets have a different shape. They are highly eccentric or “squashed.” They look more like thin ellipses than circles.

Detailed explanation-5: -The first reason has to do with the fact that the Earth’s orbit is not a perfect circle, but is elliptical with the Sun being nearer one end of the ellipse. The speed of the Earth in this elliptical orbit varies from a minimum at the farthest distance to a maximum at the closest distance of the Earth to the Sun.