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Earth's orbit


Earth's orbit is the path through which the Earth travels around the Sun. The average distance between the Earth and the Sun is 149.60 million kilometers (92.96 million miles), and a complete orbit occurs every 365.256 days (1 sidereal year), during which time Earth travels 940 million kilometers (584 million miles). Earth's orbit has an eccentricity of 0.0167. Earth's orbital motion gives an apparent movement of the Sun with respect to other stars at a rate of about 1° per day (or a Sun or Moon diameter every 12 hours) eastward as seen from Earth. Earth's orbital speed averages about 30 km/s (108,000 km/h; 67,000 mph), which is fast enough to cover the planet's diameter in seven minutes and the distance to the Moon in four hours.

Viewed from a vantage point above the north poles of both the Sun and the Earth, the Earth would appear to revolve in a counterclockwise direction about the Sun. From the same vantage point, both the Earth and the Sun would appear to rotate in a counterclockwise direction about their respective axes.

Heliocentrism is the scientific model that first placed the Sun at the center of the Solar System and put the planets, including Earth, in its orbit. Historically, heliocentrism is opposed to geocentrism, which placed the Earth at the center. Aristarchus of Samos already proposed a heliocentric model in the 3rd century BC. In the 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus' De revolutionibus presented a full discussion of a heliocentric model of the universe in much the same way as Ptolemy had presented his geocentric model in the 2nd century. This "Copernican revolution" resolved the issue of planetary retrograde motion by arguing that such motion was only perceived and apparent. "Although Copernicus's groundbreaking book...had been [printed] over a century earlier, [the Dutch mapmaker] Joan Blaeu was the first mapmaker to incorporate his revolutionary heliocentric theory into a map of the world."


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