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The rotational axis of Earth, for example, is the imaginary line that passes through both the North Pole and South Pole, whereas the Earth's orbital axis is the line perpendicular to the imaginary plane through which the Earth moves as it revolves around the Sun; the Earth's obliquity or axial tilt is the angle between these two lines.
The angle of the Earth's axial tilt with respect to the orbital plane (the obliquity of the ecliptic) varies between 22.1° and 24.5°, over a cycle of about 41,000 years. The current tilt is 23.44°, roughly halfway between its extreme values.
The Earth's orbit, with its axis tilted at 23.5 degrees, exhibits approximate axial parallelism, maintaining its direction towards Polaris (the "North Star") year-round. Together with the Earth's axial tilt, this is one of the primary reasons for the Earth's seasons, as illustrated by the diagram to the right.
Earth's rotation axis moves with respect to the fixed stars (inertial space); the components of this motion are precession and nutation. It also moves with respect to Earth's crust; this is called polar motion. Precession is a rotation of Earth's rotation axis, caused primarily by external torques from the gravity of the Sun, Moon and other bodies.
In physics and chemistry, a degree of freedom is an independent physical parameter in the chosen parameterization of a physical system.More formally, given a parameterization of a physical system, the number of degrees of freedom is the smallest number of parameters whose values need to be known in order to always be possible to determine the values of all parameters in the chosen ...
The study included data from 1993 through 2010, and showed that the pumping of as much as 2,150 gigatons of groundwater has caused a change in the Earth’s tilt of roughly 31.5 inches. The ...
The Earth already spins on a slight tilt, causing the seasons. If it spun horizontally, extreme winters and summers would doom life as we know it. What if the Earth spun sideways on its axis
Jun. 26—This week marks the end of June and we are heading rapidly around the sun. Because our planet has that interesting tilt to it, the northern hemisphere is collecting many hours of ...