Science has taken its word. Mercury, not Venus, is the closest planet to Earth

Calculations and modeling confirm that Mercury is the closest planet not only to the Earth, but also to any other planet in the solar system (1). But how?

It turns out it is. Scientists have developed a simulation of our System, including all the planets moving on their own. Then they accelerated their movement by hundreds of years to calculate the distance between them.

When they averaged these values, they were able to determine which ones were closest to each other. Surprisingly, they found that Mercury was the closest planet to the other seven. This may seem impossible, but it makes sense if we realize that each planet spends about half of its time on the opposite.

This also applies to Venus from our point of view. For as long as we can remember, she was considered the closest neighbor of the Earth. It turns out, however, that the nearest neighbor of the Earth, or rather its orbit, is not the planet Venus, but.

These iconoclastic claims stem from the work of three scholars: Take Stockman PhD student at the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) and assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Gabriela Monroe - Engineer at the US Army Engineering Research Center (ERDC) and Samuel Cordner is an engineer from NASA. The scientists used a more accurate method than before to estimate the average distance between two rotating bodies.

The orbits they developed show that Mercury has the smallest average distance from the Earth and is most often its nearest neighbor. It remains the closest planet even from Neptune's point of view (and for Pluto too, although it is no longer the defining planet).

The scientists also remind that the planetologist David Rothery he had previously run a similar simulation for the BBC radio program More or Less and had similar results.

To compare orbits, scientists used the so-called ICM modulationin which the orbits of the two planets are assumed to be circular, concentric and multi-plane - allows you to calculate the average distance between the two planets in them.

With the right assumptions, PCM can be used to quickly estimate the average distance between any set of orbiting bodies. This may be useful, for example, for a quick assessment of satellite communication repeaters, for which the signal strength decreases with the square of the distance. In any case, we now know that Venus is not our immediate neighbor and that she belongs to everyone.

According to Stockman, Monroe and Kordner, the researchers make a methodological error when calculating the distance between the planets by subtracting their average distance from the Sun. This action allows you to estimate the distance between planets only when they are closest to each other. And this is just a special case.

It is difficult to shake off the impression that the problem is largely linguistic and not astronomical. It is about simplifying the terms used in everyday speech, as well as in scientific publications. Instead of exactly "nearest orbits" they write "nearest planets". American researchers, as it were, "caught the word" of everyone who spoke and wrote like that, proving that they used inaccurate expressions.