In a press conference held on July 3, scientists announced that the MESSENGER probe has detected water in the very tenuous atmosphere surrounding Mercury.
It’s OK if you want to read that again. I had to comically rub my eyes with my fists myself.
I needn’t go into details, since Emily has a thorough article about it. While this is truly weird, it’s not entirely unexplainable. But still. Wow.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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July 3rd, 2008 at 11:17 pm
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.
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:33 pm
WoW indeed. Good Job Messenger! Great article Emily!
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:39 pm
I second shane and madge as well as another well deserved yay science.
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:44 pm
I wonder how much water that amounts to, and if any of it ever gets trapped in Earth’s atmosphere.
July 4th, 2008 at 12:05 am
Amazing! Though I have to say reading about water on otherwise parched planets never fails to make me thirsty.
July 4th, 2008 at 12:08 am
Why not doubly-ionized chlorine and silicon? It looks like there’s lots of 32, 35 and 36 there.
July 4th, 2008 at 12:24 am
Yay! (somehow, I am not feeling the excitement, though)
July 4th, 2008 at 12:51 am
Since it’s looking like water is apparently quite common, can the discovery of life be far behind?
July 4th, 2008 at 12:53 am
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.
July 4th, 2008 at 6:06 am
I think my brain asploded. But in a good way.
This is awesome!
July 4th, 2008 at 6:10 am
@Nathan: Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking too. S2+ or S2- 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.)
July 4th, 2008 at 6:19 am
@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…
July 4th, 2008 at 7:01 am
Huh. I didn’t figure that Mercury even had an atmosphere. Wow!
July 4th, 2008 at 7:18 am
Hot damn! That’s pretty strange indeed, and very interesting.
July 4th, 2008 at 10:49 am
There goes Mercury, trying to steal Mars’ thunder.
Don’t shoot the MESSENGER. lol.
(I honestly couldn’t help it)
July 4th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
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.
July 4th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
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.
July 4th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
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?”.
July 7th, 2008 at 3:09 am
oh goodness. just wait until hoagland gets wind of this…
July 7th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
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.
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.
July 7th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
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