Earth Orbit: An Extraordinary Journey Around the Sun

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:44

We are rushing around the Sun at an incredible speed - about 100,000 km/h. And every year, flying about nine hundred million kilometers, we return to the same point from which we started this incredible journey through the dusk and vacuum of space. Three main parameters: the Earth's orbit, its rotation around its own central axis and the inclination of this imaginary rod, called precession, shaped the appearance of the planet and still continue to shape its appearance. This means that they determine the whole life of mankind every minute of any day during the billions of years of the existence of the Earth.

But there is a fourth fateful parameter, without which the Earth's orbit, its rotation around the central axis, and precession would be meaningless in terms of the formation of such an unusual appearance of the planet, and, most importantly, the origin and development of life on it.

The fact is that the Earth in the solar system occupies a completely incredible, ideal, unique (here any epithet will be appropriate!) position, already mentionedworld science "Goldilocks Belt". This concept means such an arrangement of the planet relative to the heavenly body, in which water is in a liquid state, and, therefore, the emergence of life becomes possible. The Earth's orbit is just conveniently located at such a comfortable and favorable distance from the Sun.

Since its birth, our blue planet has made over four billion revolutions in its phenomenal orbit. And everything that the Earth flies past, making its cosmic path again and again, is an extremely hostile environment. This is the most extreme journey in the history of mankind.

The Earth's orbit around the Sun is a very dangerous route, where deadly solar radiation and destructive space cold are accompanied by violent attacks of comets and asteroids. This is not to mention the colossal number of less likely threats. But, despite the many dangers that lie in wait for us on the way, the Earth's orbit, as mentioned above, is located in exactly the right place. Ideal for the origin of life. The rest of the planets in the solar system were much less fortunate…

Earth was born just over four billion years ago from clouds of cosmic dust and gas that were left over from the formation of the Sun and revolved around a newborn star. This birth was a severe test, both for the planet itself and for its orbit. As it grew, the young Earth was attacked by other cosmic bodies - the era of the GreatCollisions, which ultimately predetermined the entire orderliness of the structure of our planetary system.

There is incontrovertible evidence that during this period of chaos, the Earth collided with some small planet also orbiting the Sun. The result of this cosmic cataclysm was the phenomenon of precession. The Earth began to rotate at an angle of 23.5^o relative to the vertical, which led to such a variety of climatic zones on the planet. If the central axis were perpendicular to the orbit, the day on our planet would be equal to the night. And we would never see sunrises and sunsets…