If you are anything like us you probably memorized the order of the planets in the Solar System back in school, and the older among you may still feel compelled to include Pluto even though it was downgraded a whole 19 years ago . The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

So, which is the closest planet to Earth? Well if you said Venus – according to one way of measuring the distance – you are incorrect. If you said Mars, you are even more incorrect, with the correct answer being Mercury.

While Mercury is the innermost planet in the Solar System, on average it spends more time closer to Earth than Venus does.

"As it turns out, by some phenomenon of carelessness, ambiguity, or groupthink, science popularizers have disseminated

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