At school we were taught: 'My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets' but then Pluto got kicked out of the Planet Club and ruined it but during World Space Week i heard a fascinating fact that Mercury, and not Venus, is actually our closest neighbour in the Solar System.
At first i was sceptical, a lifetime of looking at pictures of the Planetary line-up clearly had Earth squished comfortably between Venus and Mars and Mercury was the first one nearest the Sun and i know some proper Space nerds and surely they would have dropped that particular bombshell by now but i tucked it away as something to look up and then forgot about it until i heard Brian Cox say in his excellent Solar System programme that Venus is 'usually' our closest neighbour.
That adverb slotted into that sentence got me wondering and my mind went back to that guy and his assertion that 'Venus isn't our closest Planetary neighbour' which i filed away in my brain as ...pfft, and upon digging into it i found, actually, he was right, it isn't.
As the pie chart up there shows, Venus is only the closest Planet to Earth 36.6% of the time while Mercury is closer 45.5% with Mars coming beside us 17.9%.
All the Astrological big hitters from ancient times, the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and Ptolemy got it wrong as they had the Earth at the centre and it was Copernicus who put the Planets in order in the 16th Century and we have gone with that ever since and made up clever ways to drum it into schoolkids heads.
Now though, we could be about to see a big change in what we know about the order of our Solar System and it all begins with Scientists inserting little words like 'usually' into sentences about Venus being our closest Solar System neighbour which will gradually grow into words such as 'occasionally' and 'sometimes' and Mercury will take its rightful place as Earth's nearest buddy.
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