Yup. Also, when nutrients are spread so thin that they are hard to obtain, such as on a gas planet, life cannot exist. [24][106] Earth's iron core has an inner solid region and an outer liquid part. 6.5 is the ideal pH level. 2016-01-01 20:58:42. "We interpret these plains to be the youngest volcanic deposits we have yet found on Mercury," MESSENGER deputy project scientist Louise Prockter, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in 2010. It is the second densest planet of the Solar System, but also the smallest planet.The structure of Mercury makes it the most similar planet to Earth. e The outer shell is only about 300 to 400 miles (500 to 600 km) thick. Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun but, perhaps surprisingly, it does not have the highest temperatures. Mercury is the smallest of the eight planets and is closest to the sun. This methyl mercury then works it’s way up the (sea)food chain. In 1639, Giovanni Zupi used a telescope to discover that the planet had orbital phases similar to Venus and the Moon. NASA.gov brings you the latest images, videos and news from America's space agency. Although temperatures on the planet can reach as high as 801 degrees Fahrenheit (427 degrees Celsius), MESSENGER detected water-ice on its surface in the shaded portions of some of the polar craters, where the sun doesn't reach. The probe finished a one-year mapping mission,[181] and then entered a one-year extended mission into 2013. [24], Simulations indicate that the orbital eccentricity of Mercury varies chaotically from nearly zero (circular) to more than 0.45 over millions of years due to perturbations from the other planets. Mercury: The closest planet to our sun, Mercury is a terrestrial planet like Earth or Venus. [96] Its period of retrograde motion as seen from Earth can vary from 8 to 15 days on either side of inferior conjunction. [111] (Other explanations considered included a slight oblateness of the Sun.) [81], During its second flyby of the planet on October 6, 2008, MESSENGER discovered that Mercury's magnetic field can be extremely "leaky". [105], The original reason astronomers thought it was synchronously locked was that, whenever Mercury was best placed for observation, it was always nearly at the same point in its 3:2 resonance, hence showing the same face. "It's like a snow storm in which the snow formed at the top of the cloud and middle of the cloud and the bottom of the cloud, too," UCLA professor Christopher Russell said in a statement. [152], The difficulties inherent in observing Mercury mean that it has been far less studied than the other planets. Mercury’s Neighbors. No comments | | | 0 No comments. The Chinese and Sinoxenic cultures know the planet as the "water star" after one of the Five Elements. Similar, but much smaller, effects exist for other Solar System bodies: 8.62 arcseconds per century for Venus, 3.84 for Earth, 1.35 for Mars, and 10.05 for 1566 Icarus. [84] Measurements from both the Mariner 10 and MESSENGER space probes have indicated that the strength and shape of the magnetic field are stable. [108], Numerical simulations show that a future secular orbital resonant perihelion interaction with Jupiter may cause the eccentricity of Mercury's orbit to increase to the point where there is a 1% chance that the planet will collide with Venus within the next five billion years. [143] The god Odin (or Woden) of Germanic paganism was associated with the planet Mercury and Wednesday. Mercury has an orbital speed of 48 km/s (30 mi/s), whereas Earth's orbital speed is 30 km/s (19 mi/s). 24 Mercury can bind zinc and selenium, making them useless in the body and preventing them from doing... Vitamin E. When methylmercury is broken down in the body, free radicals are formed. The Sun's total angular displacement during its apparent retrograde motion as seen from the surface of Mercury is ~1.23°, while the Sun's angular diameter when the apparent retrograde motion begins and ends is ~1.71°, increasing to ~1.73° at perihelion (midway through the retrograde motion). The Moon and Mercury May Have Thick Ice Deposits Our solar system is a stormy place. Despite its small size, Mercury is very dense because it is composed mainly of heavy metals and rock – the main characteristic of terrestrial planets. [70], The icy regions are estimated to contain about 1014–1015 kg of ice,[71] and may be covered by a layer of regolith that inhibits sublimation. A strong Mercury signifies success in the above-mentioned areas. [24] A similar effect would have occurred if Mercury had been in synchronous rotation: the alternating gain and loss of rotation over revolution would have caused a libration of 23.65° in longitude.[94]. No, the planet Mercury is just called Mercury. [128], Because the shift of 0.15 revolutions in a year makes up a seven-year cycle (0.15 × 7 ≈ 1.0), in the seventh year Mercury follows almost exactly (earlier by 7 days) the sequence of phenomena it showed seven years before. Thus, to a hypothetical observer on Mercury, the Sun appears to move in a retrograde direction. Mercury and Venus occult each other every few centuries, and the event of May 28, 1737 is the only one historically observed, having been seen by John Bevis at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. [131], The ancients knew Mercury by different names depending on whether it was an evening star or a morning star. But the planet's strange magnetic field suggests that the iron turns from liquid to solid at the outskirts of the core. Space explorations e Mercury has little atmosphere, but what it does have is made up mostly of oxygen, sodium, hydrogen, helium and potassium. Does Mercury have volcanoes? burnt soil type. To land safely or enter a stable orbit the spacecraft would rely entirely on rocket motors. Follow us at @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. [163] This means that Schiaparelli's and Antoniadi's maps were not "wrong". A strong Mercury signifies success in the above-mentioned areas. [184] MESSENGER's final maneuver was on April 24, 2015, and it crashed into Mercury's surface on April 30, 2015. Most of the plains are covered with craters, suggesting that volcanism took place long ago. Mercury is the first planet from the sun in the solar system. Mercury: The Planet of Communication. Visit our corporate site. This occurs about every seven years on average. Those with a Methylmercury is of particular concern because it can accumulate in th… Please deactivate your ad blocker in order to see our subscription offer. [164][165] Not until the first space probe flew past Mercury did many of its most fundamental morphological properties become known. [13] The mean apparent magnitude is 0.23 while the standard deviation of 1.78 is the largest of any planet. its orbit appears vertical) and is at maximum elongation from the Sun (28°) and also when the Sun is 18° below the horizon, so the sky is just completely dark. The success of the search for Neptune based on its perturbations of the orbit of Uranus led astronomers to place faith in this possible explanation, and the hypothetical planet was named Vulcan, but no such planet was ever found. Although it's the smallest planet, Mercury is the second densest, topped only by Earth. If Mercury’s early volatiles did include water or ice – something still unknown – then conceivably the planet could have had habitable niches in its subsurface. Theses are produced by internal processes on the planet plus contributions from the solar wind. … In 1631, Pierre Gassendi made the first telescopic observations of the transit of a planet across the Sun when he saw a transit of Mercury predicted by Johannes Kepler. The planet's magnetosphere, though small enough to fit within Earth,[81] is strong enough to trap solar wind plasma. The thin atmosphere allows most cosmic rays to bombard the planet, stripping neutrons from elements lying on the surface. [175] At the first close approach, instruments detected a magnetic field, to the great surprise of planetary geologists—Mercury's rotation was expected to be much too slow to generate a significant dynamo effect. The Planet Mercury. For example, essentially because Mercury is closer to the Sun than Venus, Mercury spends more time in proximity to Earth; it could, therefore, be said that Mercury is the planet that is 'closest to Earth when averaged over time'. Does the planet mercury have a storm? Because of its enormous core, Mercury is shrinking. [148] (Note that most such medieval reports of transits were later taken as observations of sunspots. Researchers used this strange offset to create a model of the core. 2 Aside from being the first planet, Mercury is also the smallest of the planets with a mean diameter of about 4,880 km. Mercury is the closest planet to our sun, the smallest of the eight planets, and one of the most extreme worlds in our solar systems. 17, June 10, 1975. It is the second densest planet of the Solar System, but also the smallest planet.The structure of Mercury makes it the most similar planet to Earth. Scientists think this had to do with its formation and early life. Measurements of changes in the probe's orbital velocity were expected to be used to infer details of the planet's interior structure. One astronomical unit (abbreviated as AU), is the distance from the Sun to Earth. The exposure happens when a meteor collides with Mercury, which then causes patches of dark gray to appear. Such an impact could have stripped away much of its outer shell, leaving a core too big for remaining planet. However, when this area was first visited, by Mariner 10, this zero meridian was in darkness, so it was impossible to select a feature on the surface to define the exact position of the meridian. The Chinese and Sinoxenic cultures know the planet as the "water star" after one of the Five Elements. Mercury's thin atmosphere, or exosphere, is composed mostly of oxygen (O2), sodium (Na), hydrogen (H2), helium (He), and potassium (K). To this end, the probe carried imaging devices that gathered much-higher-resolution images of much more of Mercury than Mariner 10, assorted spectrometers to determine abundances of elements in the crust, and magnetometers and devices to measure velocities of charged particles. "These were first discovered on the moon in 1968 and caused great problems in the Apollo program because they tugged low-orbiting spacecraft around and made navigation difficult," Zuber said. This also helps to pass oxygen to the plant roots. Mercury does not have a moon. [119], Mercury can, like several other planets and the brightest stars, be seen during a total solar eclipse.[120]. a He suggested that no transits had been observed either because planets such as Mercury were too small to see, or because the transits were too infrequent. Over the years the core cools pulling the planet inward. "For sure we have not observed an active eruption or extrusion.". [72] By comparison, the Antarctic ice sheet on Earth has a mass of about 4×1018 kg, and Mars's south polar cap contains about 1016 kg of water. Due to Mercury's 3:2 spin-orbit resonance, a solar day (the length between two meridian transits of the Sun) lasts about 176 Earth days. Therefore, a small crater further west was chosen, called Hun Kal, which provides the exact reference point for measuring longitude. As a result, only two space probes have visited it so far. The "4" is a reference number in the Sumero–Akkadian transliteration system to designate which of several syllables a certain cuneiform sign is most likely designating. [74][75] Because of the quantities of these ions that were detected in Mercury's space environment, scientists surmise that these molecules were blasted from the surface or exosphere by the solar wind. on autumn evenings). Atoms that are blasted off the surface by the solar wind and micrometeoroid impacts create Mercury's exosphere. The discovery suggests that Mercury remained active well after its birth. Astronomers were reluctant to drop the synchronous rotation theory and proposed alternative mechanisms such as powerful heat-distributing winds to explain the observations. Mercury has a low gravity and receives large gusts of solar winds from the nearby Sun. It is unable to retain heat, which is why the dark side of the planet is frigid. According to measurements taken by Mariner 10, it is about 1.1% the strength of Earth's. [161], Italian astronomer Giuseppe Colombo noted that the rotation value was about two-thirds of Mercury's orbital period, and proposed that the planet's orbital and rotational periods were locked into a 3:2 rather than a 1:1 resonance. The magnetic-field strength at Mercury's equator is about 300 nT. The element Mercury (Hg) is a chemical element and has nothing to do with the naming of the planet Mercury. The equator is defined relative to the planet's poles. It made a fly-by of Earth in August 2005, and of Venus in October 2006 and June 2007 to place it onto the correct trajectory to reach an orbit around Mercury. Since Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, spins slowly, and does not have much of an atmosphere to trap heat, its temperature varies greatly. Although mercury and its compounds are toxic substances, there is ongoing debate about exactly how toxic they are. Aside from being the first planet, Mercury is also the smallest of the planets with a mean diameter of about 4,880 km. Because its orbit could no longer be accurately controlled, mission controllers instructed the probe to shut down. Radioactive decay of elements within Mercury's crust is another source of helium, as well as sodium and potassium. [172] Unfortunately, the same face of the planet was lit at each of Mariner 10's close approaches. [104], The rare 3:2 resonant tidal locking is stabilized by the variance of the tidal force along Mercury's eccentric orbit, acting on a permanent dipole component of Mercury's mass distribution. [132] They knew the planet as Στίλβων Stilbōn, meaning "twinkling", and Ἑρμής Hermēs, for its fleeting motion,[133] a name that is retained in modern Greek (Ερμής Ermis). Asked by Wiki User. CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2020 (. "Our study of Mercury's magnetic field indicates iron is snowing throughout this fluid that is powering Earth's magnetic field.". [92] This is significantly smaller than that of Jupiter, which has the second smallest axial tilt of all planets at 3.1 degrees. They determined that the rocky world has "mascons," massive gravitational concentrations associated with large impact basins. Get the latest updates on NASA missions, watch NASA TV live, and learn about our quest to reveal the unknown and benefit all humankind. These observations were most likely made by an Assyrian astronomer around the 14th century BC. Skip Navigation. The mean apparent magnitude at superior conjunction is −1.89 while that at inferior conjunction is +5.93. 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