: I just learned that mercury is in fact the closest planet to the earth. What is this madness and since when?
In: 3690
Everyone insists on phrasing it like some weird thing. It’s just the fact that when things are orbiting something, all the orbiting bodies are closer (on average!) to the parent body (the sun) than the other orbiting bodies. And the bodies closest to the center are closer to all the other bodies than ones further out.
So mercury is closer to us (and mars and jupiter and pluto and ceres and all the other objects orbiting the sun) than any of the other planets. But THE SUN is even closer. The sun can never be “on the other side of the sun” from us, but all of the other planets, asteroids, etc could be. so on average it’s closer to everything else.
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