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Ask anyone which planet is closest to Earth and the answer will be Venus. But in fact, the answer is not accurate.

(by Chen Qiang / tr. by Robert Taylor)

Partly adapted from the 2023.07 issue of Science focus

When asked which planet is closest to Earth, the way people answer the question goes something like this: look at the order of the planets in the solar system; the closest planet to Earth is either the front planet (Venus) or the later planet (Mars); check the average radius of the orbits of these planets To find out the average distance between Earth and Mars and between Earth and Venus, you can subtract the smaller radius from the larger radius of each pair of planets; the smaller distance will give you which one is closest to us-it is Venus!

Can you see what's wrong with this reasoning? What we are actually calculating in this way is the minimum possible distance between the two planets. In other words, their orbits allow them to get closer to each other. But there is a problem: any two planets stay close only in very small orbits. Therefore, to answer the question of "the closest planet to Earth", we also need to consider the position of the planets in other orbits.

Is Venus still the closest planet to Earth? About every 1.5 Earth years, the distance between the two planets is roughly shortened to 4000 kilometers. No other planet is so close to us. But is Venus always the closest planet to Earth? Absolutely not! Venus is located far away from Earth most of the time. At the furthest distance, that is, when Venus and Earth are on both sides of the sun, the distance between Venus and Earth is about 260 million kilometers.

Which planet is closest to Earth when Venus is far away from us? Sometimes, the closest planet to the earth is Mars. The smallest possible distance between us and the red planet is 5500 kilometers. Although the next time Mars is so close to us, it will have to wait until 2287 AD.

But on average, the closest planet to Earth is not Venus or Mars, but Mercury! Of all the planets in the solar system, Mercury has the smallest orbit. So although it can never be as close to Earth as Venus or Mars sometimes, it will never be very far from us. It is calculated that the average distance between Venus and Earth is about 171m, while the average distance between Mercury and Earth is about 156 million km.

The calculation also shows that for two celestial bodies moving roughly along the concentric circle orbit in the same plane, the closer the inner celestial body is to the center, the smaller the average distance between the two celestial bodies. This means that, on average, Mercury is not only the closest planet to Earth, but also the closest planet to other planets in the solar system. The logic here is the same: although Mercury has never really been close to any of these planets, its small orbit has never brought Mercury far away from them.

The conclusion is that, on average, Mercury is the closest planet to Earth and the closest planet to other planets in the solar system. But if only the smallest possible distance between planets is considered, then the closest planet to Earth is still Venus.

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