Channelknight Fadran

Re:

Quote

On average, one Earth day is less than 24 hours

The same way that the closest planet to everyone is Mercury (on average)

Basically: circles.

Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, which means that its orbit has the smallest radius out of all the bois in our solar system. While Venus is technically the planet that can ever come closest to Earth, it can also get pretty far based on the fact that our orbits have different lengths - this raises the question as to which planet is closest to Earth on average.

And the answer is Mercury.

This seems a little strange, but then you think about it. Mercury has the smallest orbit, which means that it never gets much farther away from any of the other planets as their neighbors can.

• Avg Radii of Mercury's orbit: 0.4 AU
• Avg Radii of Venus's orbit: 0.7 AU
• Avg Radii on Earth's orbit: 1 AU
• Avg Radii of Mars' orbit: 1.5 AU
• Avg Radii of Jupiter's orbit: 3 AU
• Avg Radii of Saturn's orbit: 6 AU
• Avg Radii of Uranus' orbit: 19.3 AU
• Avg Radii of Neptune's orbit: 30 AU
• Avg Radii of Pluto's orbit: 39.5 AU

So you think that Earth is closest to Venus, but Venus can get as far away from Earth as 1.7 AU, while Mercury only gets as far as 1.4.

Because circles!

And that's the same reason why the average Earth day is only 23.9 hours long - to the sun it's 24 because the fact that we're orbiting around it means that it technically takes a tad bit longer to make a complete 360 turn in terms of what the sun "sees." However, for every other star, we're so far away that the orbit doesn't matter at all, which means they see our orbit as only 23.9 hours.