Apsis
An apsis is the farthest or nearest point in the orbit of a planetary body about its primary body. The line of apsides is the line connecting the two extreme values.
Apsides pertaining to orbits around different bodies have distinct names to differentiate themselves from other apsides. Apsides pertaining to geocentric orbits, orbits around the Earth, are at the farthest point called the apogee, and at the nearest point the perigee, as with orbits of satellites and the Moon around Earth. Apsides pertaining to orbits around the Sun are named aphelion for the farthest and perihelion for the nearest point in a heliocentric orbit. Earth's two apsides are the farthest point, aphelion, and the nearest point, perihelion, of its orbit around the host Sun. The terms aphelion and perihelion apply in the same way to the orbits of Jupiter and the other planets, the comets, and the asteroids of the Solar System.
General description
There are two apsides in any elliptic orbit. The name for each apsis is created from the prefixes ap-, apo- for the farthest or peri- for the closest point to the primary body, with a suffix that describes the primary body. The suffix for Earth is -gee, so the apsides' names are apogee and perigee. For the Sun, the suffix is -helion, so the names are aphelion and perihelion.According to Newton's laws of motion, all periodic orbits are ellipses. The barycenter of the two bodies may lie well within the bigger body—e.g., the Earth–Moon barycenter is about 75% of the way from Earth's center to its surface. If, compared to the larger mass, the smaller mass is negligible, then the orbital parameters are independent of the smaller mass.
When used as a suffix—that is, -apsis—the term can refer to the two distances from the primary body to the orbiting body when the latter is located: 1) at the periapsis point, or 2) at the apoapsis point. The line of apsides denotes the distance of the line that joins the nearest and farthest points across an orbit; it also refers simply to the extreme range of an object orbiting a host body.
In orbital mechanics, the apsides technically refer to the distance measured between the barycenter of the 2-body system and the center of mass of the orbiting body. However, in the case of a spacecraft, the terms are commonly used to refer to the orbital altitude of the spacecraft above the surface of the central body.
Image:Angular Parameters of Elliptical Orbit.png|thumb|upright=1.15|Keplerian orbital elements: point G, the nearest point of approach of an orbiting body, is the pericenter of an orbit; point H, the farthest point of the orbiting body, is the apocenter of the orbit; and the red line between them is the line of apsides.
Terminology
The words "pericenter" and "apocenter" are often seen, although periapsis/apoapsis are preferred in technical usage.- For generic situations where the primary is not specified, the terms pericenter and apocenter are used for naming the extreme points of orbits ; periapsis and apoapsis are equivalent alternatives, but these terms also frequently refer to distances—that is, the smallest and largest distances between the orbiter and its host body.
- For a body orbiting the Sun, the point of least distance is the perihelion, and the point of greatest distance is the aphelion ; when discussing orbits around other stars the terms become periastron and apastron.
- When discussing a satellite of Earth, including the Moon, the point of least distance is the perigee, and of greatest distance, the apogee.
- For objects in lunar orbit, the point of least distance are called the pericynthion and the greatest distance the apocynthion. The terms perilune and apolune, as well as periselene and aposelene are also used. Since the Moon has no natural satellites this only applies to man-made objects.
Etymology
The words are formed from the prefixes peri- and apo-, affixed to the Greek word for the Sun,.
Various related terms are used for other celestial objects. The suffixes -gee, -helion, -astron and -galacticon are frequently used in the astronomical literature when referring to the Earth, Sun, stars, and the Galactic Center respectively. The suffix -jove is occasionally used for Jupiter, but -saturnium has very rarely been used in the last 50 years for Saturn. The -gee form is also used as a generic closest-approach-to "any planet" term—instead of applying it only to Earth.
During the Apollo program, the terms pericynthion and apocynthion were used when referring to orbiting the Moon; they reference Cynthia, an alternative name for the Greek Moon goddess Artemis. More recently, during the Artemis program, the terms perilune and apolune have been used.
Regarding black holes, the term peribothron was first used in a 1976 paper by J. Frank and M. J. Rees, who credit W. R. Stoeger for suggesting creating a term using the greek word for pit: "bothron". The terms perimelasma and apomelasma were used by physicist and science-fiction author Geoffrey A. Landis in a story published in 1998, thus appearing before perinigricon and aponigricon in the scientific literature in 2002.
Terminology summary
The suffixes shown below may be added to prefixes peri- or apo- to form unique names of apsides for the orbiting bodies of the indicated host/ system. However, only for the Earth, Moon and Sun systems are the unique suffixes commonly used. Exoplanet studies commonly use -astron, but typically, for other host systems the generic suffix, -apsis, is used instead.| Astronomical host object | Suffix | Origin of the name |
| Sun | Helios | |
| Mercury | Hermes | |
| Venus | Cytherean | |
| Earth | Gaia | |
| Moon | Luna Cynthia Selene | |
| Mars | Ares | |
| Ceres | Demeter | |
| Jupiter | Zeus Jupiter | |
| Saturn | Cronos Saturn | |
| Uranus | Uranus | |
| Neptune | Poseidon |
| Astronomical host object | Suffix | Origin of the name |
| Star | -astron | Lat: astra; stars |
| Galaxy | -galacticon | Gr: galaxias; galaxy |
| Barycenter | -center -focus -apsis | |
| Black hole | -melasma -bothron -nigricon | Gr: melos; black Gr: bothros; hole Lat: niger; black |
Perihelion and aphelion
The perihelion and aphelion are the nearest and farthest points, respectively, of a body's direct orbit around the Sun.Comparing osculating elements at a specific epoch to those at a different epoch will generate differences. The time-of-perihelion-passage as one of six osculating elements is not an exact prediction of the actual minimum distance to the Sun using the full dynamical model. Precise predictions of perihelion passage require numerical integration.
Inner planets and outer planets
The two images below show the orbits, orbital nodes, and positions of perihelion and aphelion for the planets of the Solar System as seen from above the northern pole of Earth's ecliptic plane, which is coplanar with Earth's orbital plane. The planets travel counterclockwise around the Sun and for each planet, the blue part of their orbit travels north of the ecliptic plane, the pink part travels south, and dots mark perihelion and aphelion.The first image features the inner planets, situated outward from the Sun as Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. The reference Earth-orbit is colored yellow and represents the orbital plane of reference. At the time of vernal equinox, the Earth is at the bottom of the figure. The second image shows the outer planets, being Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
The orbital nodes are the two end points of the "line of nodes" where a planet's tilted orbit intersects the plane of reference; here they may be 'seen' as the points where the blue section of an orbit meets the pink.
Lines of apsides
The chart shows the extreme range—from the closest approach to farthest point —of several orbiting celestial bodies of the Solar System: the planets, the known dwarf planets, including Ceres, and Halley's Comet. The length of the horizontal bars correspond to the extreme range of the orbit of the indicated body around the Sun. These extreme distances are the lines of apsides of the orbits of various objects around a host body.Earth perihelion and aphelion
In the 21st century, the Earth reaches perihelion in early January, approximately 14 days after the December solstice. At perihelion, the Earth's center is about from the Sun's center. In contrast, the Earth reaches aphelion currently in early July, approximately 14 days after the June solstice. The aphelion distance between the Earth's and Sun's centers is currently about.The dates of perihelion and aphelion change over a century due to precession and other orbital factors, which follow cyclical patterns known as Milankovitch cycles. In the short-term, such dates can vary up to 3 days from one year to another as with aphelion on 3 July 2025 and 6 July 2026. This short-term variation is due to the presence of the Moon: while the Earth–Moon barycenter is moving on a stable orbit around the Sun, the position of the Earth's center which is on average about from the barycenter, could be shifted in any direction from it—and this affects the timing of the actual closest approach between the Sun's and the Earth's centers. On a longer time scale, the last July 3 aphelion is in 2060, and the last January 2 perihelion is in 2089. The first July 7 aphelion is in 2067.
Because of the increased distance at aphelion, only 93.55% of the radiation from the Sun falls on a given area of Earth's surface as does at perihelion, but this does not account for the seasons, which result instead from the tilt of Earth's axis of 23.4° away from perpendicular to the plane of Earth's orbit. Indeed, at both perihelion and aphelion it is summer in one hemisphere while it is winter in the other one. Winter falls on the hemisphere where sunlight strikes least directly, and summer falls where sunlight strikes most directly, regardless of the Earth's distance from the Sun.
In the northern hemisphere, summer occurs at the same time as aphelion, when solar radiation is lowest. Despite this, summers in the northern hemisphere are on average warmer than in the southern hemisphere, because the northern hemisphere contains larger land masses, which are easier to heat than the seas.
Perihelion and aphelion do however have an indirect effect on the seasons: because Earth's orbital speed is minimum at aphelion and maximum at perihelion, the planet takes longer to orbit from June solstice to September equinox than it does from December solstice to March equinox. Therefore, summer in the northern hemisphere lasts slightly longer than summer in the southern hemisphere.
Astronomers commonly express the timing of perihelion relative to the First Point of Aries not in terms of days and hours, but rather as an angle of orbital displacement, the so-called longitude of the periapsis. For the orbit of the Earth, this is called the longitude of perihelion, and in 2000 it was about 282.895°; by 2010, this had advanced by a small fraction of a degree to about 283.067°, i.e. a mean increase of 62" per year.
For the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the time of apsis is often expressed in terms of a time relative to seasons, since this determines the contribution of the elliptical orbit to seasonal variations. The variation of the seasons is primarily controlled by the annual cycle of the elevation angle of the Sun, which is a result of the tilt of the axis of the Earth measured from the plane of the ecliptic. The Earth's eccentricity and other orbital elements are not constant, but vary slowly due to the perturbing effects of the planets and other objects in the solar system.
On a very long time scale, the dates of perihelion and of aphelion progress through the seasons, and they make one complete cycle in 22,000 to 26,000 years. By the year 3800, perihelion will regularly occur in February. There is a corresponding movement of the position of the stars as seen from Earth, called the apsidal precession. The dates and times of perihelion and aphelion for several past and future years are listed in the following table: