Mercury Facts

-------------------Mercury Facts! -----------------------

Hi, guys, this is a blog about Mercury!

The planet Mercury is named after the messenger of the Roman gods because even the ancients could see that the planet was swift flying. But it wasn't after the recent, that the scientists were unravelling the many mysteries of it. Mercury is the smallest planet in our Solar System. Its current diameter is just over 3000 miles or nearly 5000km and it is nearly the size of the United States of America. Just like Earth, it is a terrestrial planet with 3 main layers which are Crust, Mantle and a Crust! The only difference is that Mercury has no tectonic plates. Mercury has a giant iron core which is 85% of Mercury but Earths core and the inner core radius is 55%! Because of its core size, Mercury is shrinking because of the core is cooling down. In average it has shrunk at 4.4 miles(7 km) from the last 4.5 billion years. The shrinking planet is also the closest next to the sun and is roughly 36 million miles. Because of its distance it really effects Mercury's atmosphere so it has only one which is the Exosphere and that is the most outer atmosphere out of the terrestrial planet (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) The exosphere contains Oxygen Sodium, Hydrogen, Helium and Potassium. They are there because of the Solar winds that are made from the Sun. Because it is so close the temperature in the daytime can reach to 800 Fahrenheit or 427 degree Celsius and at nighttime it can reach to -179 degree Celsius and -290 Fahrenheit. Because it is so close to the Sun it is fast and accelerates when it is near to the the sun and slows when it is further than the Sun. It travels in an oval shape like all planets and takes only 88 earth days to orbit around the Sun. It is hard to see Mercury from Earth and it is only visited by Two spacecrafts Mariner 10 from NASA and Messenger from NASA too. Those missions give us most of what we know today but in the future we will unravel more of many mysteries.  From Picture

 https://www.dreamstime.com/mercury-cartoon-icon-one-planets-solar-system-funny-face-flat-vector-illustration-isolated-white-mercury-image166769344