Our lives revolve around the seasons. They change the weather, amount of sunlight, rainfall and how plants and animals behave: in short our daily habits are defined by it. These all important seasons all depend on how far the earth is from the sun – wrong.

The distance between the earth and sun does not vary much. The myth originates from a misunderstanding about the shape of the earth’s orbit. A lot of diagrams show the solar system from the side. This can give the impression that the orbits are highly elongated ellipses (squashed circles). However, if viewed from the top, we can see that the orbits, while indeed only slightly elliptical, are in fact close to circular. If 0 is a circular orbit and 1 is an elliptical orbit, the earth has a value of 0.017. Not a big deal, apart from Johannes Kepler.

So why do we have seasons? It’s thanks to axial tilt, or that the earth rotates around the sun at a lopsided angle. The tilt is 23.5o – pretty extreme. This means that from May to June, the northern hemisphere (America-Europe-Russia) is tilted towards the sun, which appears higher in the sky leading to more sunlight. During November through January, it is tilted away and the opposite happens – less sunlight strikes the earth leading to plummeting temperatures depending how far you are from the equator. The further away the greater the angle from the sun and the less sunlight hits the earth. Because it takes time for the ground and water to heat up, there is a lag in temperatures, which is why in the northern hemisphere, June, July and August are the hottest months, and December, January and February are the coldest – myth debunked!