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The Earth's orbit is technically an ellipse, but practically speaking it is almost a perfect circle.

The eccentricity measures how much of an ellipse the orbit is, and an ellipse whose eccentricity equals exactly zero is a circle.

The eccentricity of the Earth's orbit is 1/60, which means the Sun is off-centre by one sixtieth of the radius.

The mean radius is 149.6 million km, so the Sun is 2.5 million km off-centre. That means our distance varies from 147.1 to 152.1 million km.

The shape of the ellipse is nearly a circle and in fact the minor axis is 99.986% as large as the major axis

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10y ago

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