planet mercury

Hello friends! , I am shubham from india, and this is spaceinfinite, whwere I share interesting facts about space, time planets, universe,etc.

I also have a youtube channel named ‘ space infinite’ related to this where I share similar facts to my audience in hindi, so if you belong to india then consider visiting my channel.

Before starting I would like to mention that there is my video if you scroll down on the similar topic i.e mercury , so you could watch it also as I have explained similar things in the video.

So… lets start..

Friends!  As we all know that mercury is the smallest as well as the nearest planet to sun in our so called solar system. Lets talk about some basic information related to mercury.

The orbital period of mercury around the sun on its orbit is just 87.97 earth days, the reason we all know , as it is the nearest to the sun among all the other planets, its obviously the fastest orbiting planet as well as the planet with least orbital period, wait! Did I mentioned the speed at which it revolves around the star? Hmm.. its 47.3km/s  , whoa its too fast! Even faster than a bullet!.

Friends as we all know that almost all the planets in our solar system are named after a roman god, so is true for mercury also, the mercury was named after a roman deity ‘mercury’, who is the messenger of gods.

Do you  know that none of the planets orbit is accurately circular, all of them rotate on an elliptical orbit, the mercury’s orbit is the nearest to the circular orbit, but its also not circular, as the eccentricity of mercury is 0.205, so it has an elliptical orbit. Here I would like to mention that in astronomy if the eccentricity of an object or its path is between 0 to0.7 then its elliptical and if its eccentricity is 0 (zero), then its perfect circular.

Now lets talk about the aphelion and perihelion of the mercury from the sun, friends aphelion is the farthest point of any object from the body its orbiting due to being gravitationally bound  to it.

And perihelion is the nearest point of the object from the object its revolving.

So aphelion of mercury from the sun is 69,816,900 kms .

And perihelion of mercury from the sun is 46,001,200 kms.

The mercury has no natural satellites or moon.

the mass of mercury is about 0.055 times the mass of earth, and its surface gravity is just 3.7 m/s^2

and its escape velocity that is the minimum speed at which any object should attain to escape its gravitational field is  4.25 km/s.

surface pressure of mercury is less than 0.5 pascals.

And its surface temperature fluctuates between 200k to 340k, the reason for it , is that the mercury is a tidally locked planet thus as a result it rotates in a unique way in solar system.

The planet rotates on its axis exactly one time for every two revolutions it makes around sun.

Because mercury is a tidally locked planet , so its one side  faces the intense  heat of sun and while other remains  in darkness  for a long time as its rotation is very slow on its axis.

Because mercury is so small thus it is not capable of holding its atmosphere , thus it has no atmosphere to retain heat. Thus the temperature difference between its dark side and solar facing side ranges from  -173 degree Celsius to 427 degree Celsius.

Internal structure

Now lets talk about the internal structure of the mercury.

So, as we all know that mercury is a terrestrial planet  i.e  a rocky planet.

It also comprises of three layers namely, crust,mantle,core.

When talking about crust , the crust of mercury is way thicker than that of our earth that is 100 to 300 kms thick!. It mainly comprises of solid silicates.

When talking about mantle , the mantle of the planet is the next layer under the crust and its neary 600km thick. It comprise of solid iron sulphide .

 Now  the next layer comes core with 1800 km of radius. The core comprises of two parts , namely outer core and inner core, the outer core mainly comprises of solid iron sulphide. And the inner core is completely liquid metal.

The radius of the mercury is just 2,439.7 km/s.

When talking about the total composition of minerals on the planet , the mercury comprises of 70%metallic minirals  and 30% silicate materials.

Did you know that mercury has the highest iron content in our solar system.

the mercury has been geologically inactive for billions of years  it could be said because of presence of craters on the planet that are easily visible from space.

The planet has some wave like structures which look like wrinkles , these are called  lobate scarps and were formed when Iron core cooled and contracted. This data was taken by NASA’s messenger spacecraft that was launched in 2004 and it orbited mercury 4000 times in four years before crashing on its surface.