Is there another planet closer to Earth than Venus?

A new study measuring the average distance between planets found that the closest planet to Earth is not two neighbors of Venus or Mars.

As we know, in the Solar System, the Earth is the third planet from the Sun, between the two "neighbors" that are Venus (second planet) and Mars (fourth planet). Astronomers have long calculated that Venus is closer to the Earth than any of the aforementioned planets, the brightest star in the sky in the shape of the morning star and early evening star.

However, in a comment just published in Physics Today, a research team calculated that the closest planet to Earth is . Mercury.

Mercury - (photo: NASA).

This sounds weird, because Mercury is known to be the closest planet to the Sun and if you put 8 Solar System planets in a straight line, Venus would be between Mercury and Earth.

However, according to the new research team, which includes doctors and engineers from the University of Alabama, NASA, and the US Army's Center for Research and Technical Development, the traditional calculation only shows the distance between 2 planets when they are at the closest point in orbit. They proposed a new calculation, based on a so-called " point circle , " that calculates planet distances by taking the average distance between a series of points in their orbit over a period of 10,000 years.

With a period of around 225 days to the sun, Venus and Earth often have a long chase to get to the nearest point, taking a lot of time for isolated days on one side and the other. Sun; while Mercury has an 88-day cycle to face the Earth more.

Therefore, the average distance between Earth and Mercury is much closer than the distance between Earth and Venus.

However, not everyone agrees with the calculation described above. Professor Steven Beckwith, director of the Space Science Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley (USA), who was not involved in the study, said this was an interesting way to redefine the term "closest" , but not deep enough. He examples that people will still assume that the next-door neighbor is the one closest to them, even if they spend 7 months each year living somewhere else.