Planets Near To Earth | Which Planet is Nearest To Earth? Not Venus nor Mars

Which planet is nearest to Earth? I am sure that the maximum of the people will say, Venus or Mars. But actually it is wrong by some of the scientists. So, first of all, we have to know basically how scientists predict the distance between two planets…

So what they do they just take the distance of each planet from the Sun and subtract both the result and get the distance between each planet. The example they take the distance of the Earth from the Sun and the distance of Mars from the Sun and they subtract the Earth distance from Mars and get the distance between both the planets. But actually it is not the purely correct way of determining the distance between two planets.

As from high school, we grew up seeing such a picture of the solar system as shown up. But that is not right. In the actual solar system, planets are not aligned in such a way in a single line. They are like scattered marbles on the floor. Because they all have their own orbits of different sizes, and different angles too. Now again the question arises all the planets have their own orbits revolving around the Sun at a different speed so it is possible that sometimes a planet and its neighbour planet is on different sides of the Sun so at that time they will be at maximum distance and if a person asks the nearest planet of that planet at a particular time so maybe it will be different to answer. And this is real in our solar system every planets neighbour are always changing because of different orbits and different revolution speed.

Therefore if a person asks which is the nearest planet to Earth it will be very difficult to answer because every time planets neighbours are changing. When Venus is at the other side of the sun Mars become Earth’s nearest for a short while and again when Venus and Earth are aligned in a straight path. Then again Venus becomes Earth’s nearest planet. So, for this reason, we can take a planet which is nearest to or a neighbour of another planet for most of the time. And then the answer comes for Mercury. Yes according to it Mercury is the nearest planet of the Earth for most of the time.

So from this mindset, a commentary was published on March 12, 2019, in a magazine called Physics Today which says although Venus is the planet that comes closest to Earth as it sweeps by on its orbit, Mercury stays the closest to Earth the longest.

Tom Stockman, a PhD student at the University of Alabama; Gabriel Monroe, a mechanical engineer at the U.S. Army’s Engineer Research and Development Center; and Samuel Cordner, a mechanical engineer at NASA wrote in the commentary when people calculate the distance between two planets, they usually subtract the two planets’ average distances from the sun as said above. But that’s not always right to predict or assume the closest planet of a planet. Venus is maximum time another side of the Sun so it can’t be its nearest planet.

As already discussed we can't say about any particular planet but if we consider a planet which is nearest to the Earth for most of the time then it is Mercury. Because Mercury orbit is very small so most of the time it is on the same side of the Earth.

And there is another amazing fact that Mercury is the nearest planet for all the planet in Solar System because it remains nearest to every planet in Solar System for the maximum time whether it be Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus or Neptune.

Originally published at https://physicsforuniverse.blogspot.com on July 25, 2020.