How is it determined that the Earth is tilted on its axis by 23.5 degrees?
In: Planetary Science
The earth’s orbit is a flat circle. If the earth were not tilted, then the sun would always be directly overhead at noon on the equator, every single day, because the equator would line up exactly with our orbit. It’s not…the latitude that gets the sun directly overhead changes each day, moving north up to the June solstice and then south down to the December solstice. The maximum latitude it reaches on these solstices is 23.5 degrees. We call these latitudes the *tropics*.
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