2 Planets Closest To Earth

What'southward the Closest Planet to Globe? Non Venus, Scientists Say

A colorful view of Mercury produced from images taken by the MESSENGER spacecraft. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Establishment of Washington)

What is the closest planet to Earth? The answer most people would give is Venus. Merely … it might really be Mercury.

Although Venus is the planet that comes closest to Earth as it sweeps by on its orbit, Mercury stays the closest to Globe the longest, according to a commentary published Tuesday (March 12) in the mag Physics Today.

"Past some miracle of abandon, ambiguity, or groupthink, scientific discipline popularizers have disseminated information based on a flawed assumption about the average distance betwixt planets," Tom Stockman, a Ph.D. pupil at the University of Alabama; Gabriel Monroe, a mechanical engineer at the U.S. Army'south Engineer Research and Evolution Center; and Samuel Cordner, a mechanical engineer at NASA wrote in the commentary. [See Photos of Meteorites from Around the World]

When people summate the distance betwixt two planets, they normally subtract the 2 planets' average distances from the sun. Simply here's the matter: That only calculates the distance between 2 planets when they're closest to each other, they said. Some of the fourth dimension, Venus is all the fashion on the reverse side of the Sun because the two planets move at unlike speeds.

In the commentary, the researchers devised a new mathematical technique, chosen the indicate-circumvolve method, to measure the distances between planets. This method averages the distance between a bunch of points on each planet's orbit, thereby taking fourth dimension into consideration.

When measured that way, Mercury was closest to Globe most of the fourth dimension. Not only that, but Mercury was too the closest planet to Saturn, and Neptune, and all of the other planets. The researchers checked their findings past mapping out where the planets were in their orbits every 24 hours for 10,000 years.

However, not anybody agrees with this new definition of "closest" planet.

"Suppose yous live in a house where the people who live side by side door to you lot spend one-half the year someplace, maybe you live in Wisconsin and your nearest neighbors spend seven months of the long winters in Florida," said Steven Beckwith, the director of the Space Science Laboratory and professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley, who was not office of the commentary. "During the winter, the people in the next house over would be closer to you."

Simply about people would yet say that their closest neighbors are the ones who live immediately next door for the rest of the year, Beckwith told Live Science. "It is an interesting way of redefining 'closest,' simply it is hardly profound."

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Originally published on Live Science .

Yasemin is a staff writer at Live Scientific discipline, covering health, neuroscience and biology. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Science and the San Jose Mercury News. She has a bachelor's caste in biomedical applied science from the University of Connecticut and a graduate certificate in science communication from the Academy of California, Santa Cruz.