{"id":199031,"date":"2024-11-09T05:14:48","date_gmt":"2024-11-09T11:14:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/11\/a-new-planet-is-now-our-closest-neighbor"},"modified":"2024-11-09T05:14:48","modified_gmt":"2024-11-09T11:14:48","slug":"a-new-planet-is-now-our-closest-neighbor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/11\/a-new-planet-is-now-our-closest-neighbor","title":{"rendered":"A New Planet Is Now Our Closest Neighbor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/GDgbVIqGADQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The order of the planets is something most of us learn in school: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and (until 2006) Pluto.<\/p>\n<p>So, you would be forgiven for thinking that as Earthlings, our closest planetary neighbor is Venus. And in a way, you would be right \u2013 at its nearest, Venus approaches Earth closer than any other planet in the Solar System. Likewise, its orbit is closer to our orbit than any other. However, in another sense, you would be wrong. At least, that is the argument put forward in <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/physicstoday.scitation.org\/do\/10.1063\/PT.6.3.20190312a\/full\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">an article published in PhysicsToday<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>To identify our closest neighbor, engineers affiliated with NASA, Los Alamos National Observatory, and the US Army\u2019s Engineer Research Development Center built a computer simulation to calculate the average proximity of Earth to its three nearest planets (Mars, Venus, and Mercury) over a 10,000-year-period. Because of the way the planets align during their respective orbits, the model shows that Earth spends more time nearer to Mercury than either Venus or Mars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The order of the planets is something most of us learn in school: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and (until 2006) Pluto. So, you would be forgiven for thinking that as Earthlings, our closest planetary neighbor is Venus. And in a way, you would be right \u2013 at its nearest, Venus approaches [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,9,1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-military","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199031\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}