Comments on: Water and Mercury do mix!

By: quasidog

quasidog — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 05:00:53 +0000

OK well to answer my own question .. yes it does have a magnetic field. I Did not know it was so iron rich. One of the later issues of Sky and Telescope Australia had a 4 page article on Mercury’s makeup. Talk about timing ;p

By: Torbjörn Larsson, OM

Torbjörn Larsson, OM — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:21:34 +0000

Not so surprising as solar wind hydrogen sputtering of oxide minerals have been proposed to nicely account for the amount of putative Moon water. Nothing is new under the Sun! [BA pun.]

And of course we have scifi speculating way before this. Stephen Baxter describes the Mercury atmosphere replenishment and water cycle in the chapter “Cilia-of-Gold” in Vacuum Diagrams, here driven by the solar wind (hydrogen/helium atmosphere) and heating (water from rocks), to snow down in a deep polar crater. (And provide a habitat for the descendants of a crashed space ship., such as Cilia-of-Gold.)

Btw, browsing I see that Baxter puts Mercury shrinkage down to closer to two kilometers (in 1997) instead of four, so if there is a future ed he has some revising to do there as well. A recurrent problem of sufficiently “hard” scifi.

I suspect there’s lots of pressure at NASA to report anything that could be water as water.

Perhaps, but that wasn’t the case here. It can be iffy to sort out MA readings, but there is often enough info in them to do it with a reasonable likelihood for the result. It isn’t different from other pattern matching for spectra, genomes, et cetera, YMMV.

By: Jarrad

Jarrad — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:09:27 +0000

oh goodness. just wait until hoagland gets wind of this…

By: Nathan Myers

Nathan Myers — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:11:24 +0000

I suspect there’s lots of pressure at NASA to report anything that could be water as water. The PR staff hate publishing reports that say “it could be water or chlorine, who the hell knows?”.

By: jest

jest — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 01:02:28 +0000

Well, since the discovery of asteroids with moons, I think there has had to be a lot of rethinking as far as what we actually know about the Solar system is concerned. The science is there to learn though, and 2008 will indeed be quite a great year of discovery.

By: quasidog

quasidog — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 22:29:06 +0000

The obvious thought would be the Sun having blown the water and atmosphere all away by now. It must be being held or protected there by something else like a magnetic field or something. Does Mercury have a magnetic field ? Wouldn’t it’s extremely low mass fail to hold any form of atmosphere together ? Really strange.

By: jest

jest — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 16:49:50 +0000

There goes Mercury, trying to steal Mars’ thunder.

Don’t shoot the MESSENGER. lol.

(I honestly couldn’t help it)

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:18:42 +0000

Hot damn! That’s pretty strange indeed, and very interesting.

By: Jewel

Jewel — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:01:51 +0000

Huh. I didn’t figure that Mercury even had an atmosphere. Wow!

By: Simon C.

Simon C. — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:19:15 +0000

@Jason + Nathan : I am convinced they considered it very seriously, but I suspect it doesn’t add up if you try to see what parts of that peak is caused by trace amounts.

Now, if only someone had the time to calculate the rate at which water molecules escape Mercury’s atmosphere…

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:10:43 +0000

@Nathan: Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking too. S²⁺ or S^2- would show up as a peak at 16, and Wikipedia (if you’re willing to assume it’s getting this right) says that those two ionizations are common.

Unless there’s some non-obvious reason I’m missing here, that peak in the “water group” is encouraging, and worth a second look, but not necessarily indicative of good ol’ H₂O

(Apologies if the comment editor doesn’t allow markup. I don’t see a list of approved HTML, or a preview button.)

By: Rav Wisnton

Rav Wisnton — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:06:28 +0000

I think my brain asploded. But in a good way.

This is awesome!

By: jest

jest — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:53:24 +0000

Not too surprising. Comets go hurtling towards the sun on a fairly regular basis. Mercury scoots around the sun and would likely intercept some of these doomed bodies of ice. The result? Water in Mercury’s atmosphere. Of course, I had never thought of this until Messenger actually reported it. It just makes sense though, even if it’s surprising that any water manages to survive in Mercury’s atmosphere. THAT’S the cool part.

By: Michael L

Michael L — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:51:53 +0000

Since it’s looking like water is apparently quite common, can the discovery of life be far behind?

By: IBY

IBY — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:24:41 +0000

Yay! (somehow, I am not feeling the excitement, though)

By: Nathan Myers

Nathan Myers — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:08:22 +0000

Why not doubly-ionized chlorine and silicon? It looks like there’s lots of 32, 35 and 36 there.

By: The Chemist

The Chemist — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:05:54 +0000

Amazing! Though I have to say reading about water on otherwise parched planets never fails to make me thirsty.

By: Ray T.

Ray T. — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:44:04 +0000

I wonder how much water that amounts to, and if any of it ever gets trapped in Earth’s atmosphere.

By: John Phillips, FCD

John Phillips, FCD — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:39:16 +0000

I second shane and madge as well as another well deserved yay science.

By: madge

madge — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:33:23 +0000

WoW indeed. Good Job Messenger! Great article Emily!

By: shane

shane — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:17:11 +0000

Mercury has an atmosphere? And vulcanism? Amazing. 2008 is turning out to be a very good year for “finding stuff out”. The cool thing is the more they discover the more questions that are raised. I learnt more about Mercury in that one article from Emily than I can recall ever learning before. Yay science.