Mercury Is Slowly Collapsing in on Itself, and It’s Worse Than We Thought
· Vice
Mercury is our solar system’s smallest planet, and it is determined to get smaller. It’s already about one-third the width of the Earth, and, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, it’s shriveling at a pace of 10 to 30 percent faster than anyone had previously realized.
When Mercury formed 4.5 billion years ago amid clashes of space rocks, it was scorching hot and significantly fatter. Over the eons, however, its metallic core cooled, and that drop in internal temperature caused the whole planet to deflate like a soufflé. As the inside collapsed, the hard outer crust started cracking and crumpling into the jagged cliffs and valleys that make up Mercury’s surface.
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Scientists have known this for a while, but thought it had lost only a couple of miles over its lifetime. Lead author Gaku Nishiyama and his team at the German Aerospace Center realized that billions of years of asteroid strikes tossed up massive debris fields, essentially burying evidence that the planet was shrinking.
Mercury Is Shrinking Much Faster Than Scientists Thought
The researchers think that beneath all of that debris, Mercury may have shrunk by up to 14.5 miles in diameter, a massive weight loss for a planet that was already pretty small to begin with.
“Every planet is an odd little duck that has a story to tell,” notes Brown University planetary geoscientist Sam Birch, speaking with the New York Times. Knowing how fast Mercury deflates tells us what it’s made of, how big its metallic core really is, how rocky worlds cool down, and what happens to their outsides when they do.
Get ready for some more Mercury news in the not-too-distant future, as the European and Japanese joint BepiColombo spacecraft is slated to enter Mercury’s orbit by November to scan its craggy surface up close.
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