Is Venus the closest planet to Earth? Study explains that maybe it’s not

In school we learn the order of the planets in the Solar System and they teach that Venus is the closest planet to Earth… But this is totally true. According to a study published in the scientific journal Physics Today, Venus is not actually the closest planet to earth. Mercury could be the answer to this age-old question.

The work was led by engineers affiliated with NASA, the Los Alamos National Observatory, and the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center. In 2019, they calculated the average proximity of Mars, Venus and Mercury to Earth from a computer simulation.

According to the analysis, although Mercury is the innermost planet of the Solar System, it is closer to Earth than Venus; in a few words, Venus is closest to Earth, but on average Mercury spends the most time close to our planet. The engineers explain that the lack of understanding on the subject may have been caused by confusion by a think tank of those who spread the science, due to uncertainty about the subject, or for other reasons.

“Apparently, due to some phenomenon of surveillance, uncertainty, or groupthink, science popularizers have published information about the average distance between planets based on an erroneous assumption. Using the mathematical method we developed, we determined that Earth’s closest neighbor, when averaged over time, is actually Mercury.”

Not Venus… Mercury!

By calculating the positions of eight planets in the Solar System over a period of ten thousand years, scientists were able to determine the distance between each pair of planets. In this way, engineers discovered that Mercury is, on average, the closest planet to Earth, and also the closest planet to Neptune.

The fact is that the calculations show that Mercury is, on average, the closest planet to all the other planets in the Solar System. The work was based on the point-circle method (PCM), a mathematical equation that studies the orbits of planets.

“From the PCM technique, we noticed that when the inner orbit is minimum, the distance between two orbiting objects is minimal. This observation results in what we call the hurricane result (named after an episode of the Rick and Morty cartoon): two orbits with concentric and circular orbits approximately in the same plane. For an object, the average distance between two objects decreases as the orbital radius increases. The inner decreases. It is clear from this result and the table that Mercury (average orbital radius 0.39 AU) [unidades astronômicas]Scientists conclude that, on average, the closest planet to Earth is not Venus (average radius 0.72 AU).

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