VENUS IS NO LONGER THE PLANET CLOSEST TO EARTH, RESEARCHERS SAY

We often think of Venus as our closest brother in the Solar System. It is the most Earth-like in size, mass, and composition. And we thought it was the closest in terms of physical distance - but it seems that this honor can belong to Mercury.

No, the order of the planetary orbits is still the same. Mercury is still the innermost planet, and the orbit of Venus is still closer to Earth's orbit. But, according to new calculations, Mercury is, on average, closer to Earth than Venus. It seems counterintuitive, does not it? And maybe that's what led us to the misconception in the first place.

"By some phenomena of neglect, ambiguity, or group thinking, science advocates have released information based on a misguided assumption about the average distance between planets," engineers Tom Stockman, Gabriel Monroe, and Samuel Cordner write. "Using a more precise method to estimate the average distance between two bodies in orbit, we find that this distance is proportional to the relative radius of the inner orbit," they said.

"In other words, Mercury is closer to Earth, on average, than Venus because it orbits the Sun more closely," they concluded. The team, whose work sites cover the Los Alamos National Observatory, the US Engineer's Research Development Center and NASA, have not yet published their calculations in a peer-reviewed article, but the authors note that they are eager for analysis of the scientific community.

The way we normally calculate distances between planets, the team observes, is based on their distance from the Sun. Earth, on average, is 1 astronomical unit (AU) from the Sun; Venus is 0.722 AU; Mercury is 0.387 AU.

But if you subtract Venus distance from Earth, what you actually get is the average distance between your orbits - not the distance between the planets themselves. As the planets move at different speeds, they spend a good deal of time on opposite sides of the Sun. Because Mercury is closest to the Sun, the distance between it and the Earth when they are at their greatest distance is much less than the distance between Earth and Venus.

"For two bodies with approximately coplanar, concentric and circular orbits, the average distance between the two planets decreases as the radius of the inner orbit also decreases," the researchers said.

So now we are all neighbors to Mercury, and instead of casting out Venus, we still love all, near and far. [ ScienceAlert ]