Mercury is Bizarre and Here’s Why!

We all know Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun and the smallest. But there’s a lot more about this mysterious planet.

Mercury Has a Strange Orbit

Mercury’s orbit is not only extremely rapid, but also extremely elliptical. The planet comes as near to the sun as 29 million miles and as far away as 42 million miles. So fascinating! According to NASA, Mercury orbits the sun every 88 Earth days, travelling at almost 29 miles per second, which is faster than any other planet in the solar system.

It Has a Very Small Amount of Ice on the Poles.

The MESSENGER spacecraft of NASA detected water ice inside several of Mercury’s craters in 2012. Mercury’s north polar area has significantly more ice than previously thought, according to research published in 2017.

Mercury being the closest planet to the Sun, it may appear odd that it has surface ice. However, because the planet has very low axial tilt, the polar areas receive very little direct sunlight, and certain craters are continuously in the dark. Mercury has no atmosphere and so, its temperatures increase and decrease rapidly over the day and night.

Mercury Has Weird Magnetic Tornadoes

Mercury’s magnetic field baffles the best scientists; the planet looks to be too tiny to support a worldwide magnetic field, but it does. Despite having just 1% the intensity of Earth’s magnetic field, it can make quite a ruckus on Mercury’s surface in the form of magnetic tornadoes.

When Mercury’s magnetic field interacts with the solar wind, it may create magnetic tornadoes that route rapid, hot solar wind plasma to the planet’s surface, according to NASA. When solar wind plasma strikes the surface, it displaces neutrally charged atoms, causing the loops to rise into Mercury’s atmosphere.