“Seasons are caused by Earth's distance from the Sun”

It's a common and understandable assumption: the closer you are to a heat source, the warmer you feel. This intuition often leads people to believe that Earth's seasons are caused by our planet's changing distance from the Sun. When it's summer, many imagine Earth must be closer to the Sun, and when winter, farther away. This simple, direct cause-and-effect thinking is a natural way to try and understand the world around us.

However, the true driver of our planet's seasons is not its varying distance from the Sun, but rather the consistent 23.5-degree tilt of Earth's axis. As our planet orbits the Sun, this tilt means that different hemispheres are angled towards or away from our star at various times of the year. When a hemisphere is tilted towards the Sun, it receives more direct sunlight for longer periods, leading to warmer temperatures and summer. Conversely, when tilted away, sunlight strikes at a more oblique angle and for fewer hours, resulting in winter. In fact, the Earth is actually closest to the Sun in early January, during the Northern Hemisphere's winter, and farthest away in early July, during its summer.

The persistence of this myth often stems from two sources. Firstly, diagrams of Earth's orbit sometimes exaggerate its elliptical shape, making the distance variations seem more significant than they are. Secondly, the fundamental human experience of feeling warmer when closer to a fire or heat lamp reinforces the incorrect intuition that orbital distance must dictate planetary temperature. This combination of simplified visual aids and everyday experience makes the distance myth a very sticky one, despite the clear scientific evidence pointing to axial tilt as the real cause.