Oct 7, 2023 at 6:25 PM Update: 8 hours ago
The smallest planet in our solar system, Mercury, continues to shrink. Heat from the planet’s core disappears through new cracks in the surface, new research shows.
The results of the new research were published in the scientific journal earlier this month Nature Geoscience. It was already known that Mercury has been shrinking and cooling for thousands of years. It creates gigantic steep slopes on the planet, because the rocky crust buckles due to internal shrinkage.
New cracks are still forming in the slopes, the research shows. These provide evidence that the slopes have moved over the past 300 million years.
“Our team found unequivocal signs that many slopes continue to move recently, in a geological perspective, even though they were formed billions of years ago,” geologist David Rothery of Britain’s Open University said in an article. “Compare it to the wrinkles on an apple as it ages, although this happens due to dehydration. Mercury shrinks because it cools down.”
The process appears to be the same as that of the moon, where measuring instruments recorded tremors due to shrinkage. There are no instruments on Mercury, but in 2025 the European space mission BepiColombo should enter orbit around the planet. This rocket was launched in October 2018 and is on its way to Mercury. The spacecraft will explore the surface of the planet.
As the smallest of the eight planets in our solar system, Mercury is barely larger than our moon. The planet is closest to the sun, with a distance ranging from 46 to 70 million kilometers.
Improvement: An earlier version of this post said “trillions of years.” That is incorrect, because it concerns billions of years. We have edited the message.
2023-10-07 16:25:32
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