Mercury is actually the planet closest to all the other planets

If anyone asks you which planet is closest to Earth, you will probably drop Venus. It's a perfectly normal thing to say, but it's also wrong. Many websites and even NASA itself say that Venus is our closest planetary neighbor. A new article in Physics Today provides a more accurate way to determine which planets are closest to each other. It turns out that averages are highly counterintuitive. Mercury (above) is the closest planet to Earth. In fact, it's the closest planet to every other planet.

This is amazing because we all have a misconception inherent in the structure of the solar system. It is true that Venus revolves around the sun between Earth and Mercury. The distance from the Earth to the sun is 1 astronomical unit (AU) and Venus at 0.72 AU from the sun. With a little bit of arithmetic, you might think that Venus is only 0.28 AU from Earth. It is true that during a very short period in orbit of Venus. The rest of the time is much further.

The new analysis includes a model that tracks all planets over 10,000 Earth years. This supposes that the planetary orbits are roughly circular and that all the planets revolve around the same plane. It's pretty close to reality for the new rankings to be accurate. Researchers call this method of measurement the point-circle method (PCM). He considers that the distance between two planets is the average distance between all the points along their respective orbits.

Thus, the orbit of Mercury is not very far from the sun, but Venus moves much further away from the Earth during its orbit. Even if it gets closer sometimes, it can go up to 1.72 AU. Based on PCM technology, Mercury is closer to the Earth nearly 50% of the time, the rest being divided between Mars and Venus. Therefore, Mercury is closer.

It becomes stranger – the same principle applies to all planets. Even Neptune, at around 30 AU from the sun, is on average closer to Mercury than Uranus, which revolves around 19 AU. Just like Earth and Venus, these two planets spend much of their time on opposite sides of the solar system, even though their orbits eventually bring them at a distance of a few AU to each other.

What about strange objects like Pluto? Well, it's not a planet, but there could be a similar correlation. However, this does not fit into the PCM model because Pluto orbits on a different plane and crosses Neptune's orbit.

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