Mercury (planet) diagram on the right illustrates the effects of the eccentricity, showing Mercury's orbit overlaid with a circular orbit having the same semi-major axis. Mercury's higher velocity when it is near perihelion is clear from the greater distance it covers in each 5-day interval. In the diagram the varying distance of Mercury to the Sun is represented by the size of the planet, which is inversely proportional to Mercury's distance from the Sun. This varying distance to the Sun leads to Mercury's surface being flexed by tidal bulges raised by the Sun that are about 17 times stronger than the Moon's
Nearest neighbour distribution hence why it is used as a non-parametric test for whether data behaves as though it were from a Poisson process. It is, however, thought possible to construct non-Poisson point processes for which = 1, but such counterexamples are viewed as somewhat 'artificial' by some and exist for other statistical tests. More generally, -function serves as one way (others include using factorial moment measures) to measure the interaction between points in a point process. Nearest neighbour distribution In probability and statistics, a nearest neighbor function, nearest neighbor distance distribution, nearest-neighbor distribution function or nearest neighbor distribution is a mathematical function