Mercury, not Venus, is the closest planet to Earth

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Earth is the third planet of the Sun, so our nearest neighbor must be planet two or four, right?
False! Neither Venus nor Mars is the right answer.
Three scientists ran the numbers. In this YouTube video, one of them explains why our nearest neighbor is … Mercury!

Has Musk chosen the wrong planet to die on?

Picture: upload.wikimedia.org

Elon Musk said that he wanted to die on Mars.

In 2024, Elon Musk wants to land humans on Mars – the billionaire entrepreneur said that he wanted himself to go on the Red Planet and that he even wanted to die there (but not by impact, he said). quipped). But did SpaceX choose the wrong planet to colonize? If the plan was to choose the nearest planet: yes indeed.

While Mars occupies an important place in human culture and imagination, most scientific sources refer to Venus as the closest planet to Earth. NASA mentions Venus as our closest neighbor. But it's true that no other planet is getting closer – the shortest approach is 0.28 AU (1) or 25 million miles (41 million km) – it is not It is not true that Venus is the closest planet (2) on average (although that is also often stated wrongly).

Defective alignment of the solar system

Image: Wikipedia

A list of usual suspects. Only the sizes are on the scale, not the distances. And they do not generally align as well as that.

"It turns out that, through a phenomenon of carelessness, ambiguity or group thinking, scientific popularizers have disseminated information based on an erroneous assumption regarding the average distance between planets", write Tom Stockman, Gabriel Monroe and Samuel Cordner in an article published by Physics today.

They then explain the mathematical method that they have developed to prove that, on average, it is Mercury – the first rock of the Sun – the closest neighbor to the Earth.

Long story short: Mercury is on average closest to the Earth because it revolves around the Sun. It also means – bewildering – that Mercury is the closest neighbor to all the planets in our solar system, including the gaseous giants Jupiter and Saturn and the snowball planets Neptune and Uranus on the frozen edges of the system.

Incredibly cool or incredibly obvious?

Picture: Section Tomment

Simulation of Mercury (gray), Venus (orange), Earth (blue) and Mars (red) surrounding the Sun, and calculation of average distances to the Earth.

In Physics today, the three scientists describe their method in great detail. For lay people like (probably) you and me (certainly), the YouTube video at the top of this article, commented by Mr. Stockman, is more enlightening. In 6 minutes 40 seconds, he had me convinced.

Although some commentators agree ("a new way of thinking!"), One or two are irritated common people are just starting now ("Any idiot should have been able to report it").

Anyway, you have to be sensitive to the comment that seems to have understood this for a long time, but who did not have this video to prove it: "I told my school teacher there are many years that Mercury was closest to Earth but they made fun of me. "

Video found here sure Youtube. If you like your maths, like Saturn loves gravity (spoiler: heavy), here is the article in Physics today.

Strange cards # 966

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(1) 1 Astronomical Unit (AU) is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun: 150 million miles (150 million km).

(2) Their name takes its name from the Greek "planetai" for "vagabond", the planets revolve around the Sun, from where the immense variation of the distances which separate them.