: I just learned that mercury is in fact the closest planet to the earth. What is this madness and since when?
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>I just learned that mercury is in fact the closest planet to the earth. What is this madness and since when?
You’re missing a pair of words.
Mercury is the closest planet to the Earth ***on average***. Mercury orbits faster, as a result of being closer to the Sun, and thus is more often on the same side of the Sun as Earth.
This doesn’t inherently mean that Mercury is *always* the closest, just that when you expand the timeframe out to significantly large timescales, Mercury *tends* to be the closest.
The other fun fact is that this isn’t something special about Earth; Mercury is, on average, the closest planet in the Solar System to *every other planet*.
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