A group of researchers from the Carnegie Institute of Science states that a new study by Mercury indicates that the planet closest to the Sun very quickly loses its mass. And she loses it much faster than previous studies showed in the same direction. The fact that the already small world continues to decline has been known to scientists for a long time, but astronomers are more worried about how quickly this process takes place.
As part of a new study, astronomers studied the American Messenger automatic interplanetary station for the study of Mercury, which has been in orbit around the planet since March 18, 2011 and was launched on August 3, 2004 on board the Delta II launch vehicle from the launch vehicle located at the US Air Force Base on Cape Canaveral.
According to the data that the probe transmitted back to Earth, the crust of Mercury as a result of the cooling effects has already decreased by more than 7 kilometers, which turned out to be much higher than previous estimates. This discovery helped scientists solve a decade of controversy about what actually happened in the internal structure of the planet billions of years ago.
“The new data helped resolve the long-standing controversy and connection between the thermal history and the real cause of Mercury diminishing,” says Paul Byrne of the Carnegie Institute of Science and a leading expert in the new study.
It is important to remember that the geology of Mercury is very different from the geology of the Earth. While on our planet there are 12 large tectonic plates that move over the molten magma, the first planet from the Sun has only one tectonic plate that makes up its entire surface. In this case, the total thickness of the mantle and crust of Mercury is only 420 kilometers. Mercury has an iron core, the diameter of which is approximately 4040 kilometers by approximate standards. In turn, the thickness of only one mantle layer of the Earth is 2900 kilometers, not to mention the additional (on average) 40 kilometers of the earth's crust.
The first signs that the planet was decreasing were recorded in the 1970s of the last century by the American automatic interplanetary station NASA Mariner-10. For scientists, this became apparent when they discovered so-called wrinkled ridges on the planet, which form in the crust of the planet under the influence of cooling effects on the core. Once being liquid and consisting of iron, it began to harden. Thanks to the new Messenger spacecraft, Byrne was able to gain access to a multitude of new images of the Mercury crust.
The team of astronomers in the framework of the new study studied a total of information about 5935 wrinkled ridges of Mercury. It turned out that at the time when the Mariner-10 apparatus was studying the planet, scientists had recorded the loss of a radius of 1 to 2 kilometers by Mercury, but the new data Messenger showed that the planet had already lost 7 kilometers of its diameter during this time.
The article is based on materials .
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