Close or closer

"Change is the go of the day" -proverb goes. Pure  knowledge dispels the ignorance of wrong  conceptions, superstitions and confusions. Thirst  for knowledge provokes to raise many questions and experiments, along with explorations accelerating the dimensions to come to conclusions. For long the astonomers have been busy in thinking what is the closest planet to Earth? Most people will answer 'Venus' But it Might be actually be mercury. 

Although Venus is the planet that comes closest to Earth as it sweeps by on its orbit Mercury stays longer and closest to the Earth.

When people calculate the distance between two  planets they usually substract the two planet's average distance from the sun, But here is the thing. This only calculates the distance between two planets when they're closest to each other. Some of the time, Venus is all the way on the opposite side of the sun because the two planets move at different speeds. 

In the commentary the researchers devised a new mathematical technique called the point-circle  method to measure the distance between planets. This method averages the distance between a bunch of points on each planer's orbit. thereby taking time into consideration  When measured that way, Mercury was closest to Earth most of the time. Not only that. Mercury was also the closest planet to Saturn and Neptune and all of the other planets The researchers checked their findings by mappi1ng out where the planets. were in their orbits every 24 hours for 10,000 years.

However, not everyone agrees to this new definition of "Closest" planet "Suppose you live in house where the people who live rent door to you spend half the year some places may be you live in Wisconsin and your nearest neighbor spend seven months of long winters in Florida" said Steven Beck with the director of the space science laboratory and professor of Astronomy at UC Berkeley, who was not part of the commentary. "During winter, the people in the next house over would be closer to you".