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Mercury Turns Out To Be a Weird Little World
sighted writes "The robotic spacecraft MESSENGER, now orbiting the first planet, has found new findings odd features on its surface, including unexplained, blueish 'hollows' that may be actively forming today. The findings will be published this week in Science. One scientist said, 'The conventional wisdom was that Mercury is just like the Moon. But from its vantage point in orbit, MESSENGER is showing us that Mercury is radically different from the Moon in just about every way we can measure.'" As you might expect, National Geographic has beautiful imagery to go along with the story.
has found new findings
As opposed to what? Finding old findings?
I'm pretty sure the blue color is false color showing height, as the image caption reads: "A colorized MESSENGER picture shows hollows (blue) in the Raditladi impact basin on Mercury."
And thus proving that the rest of the solar isn't isn't a static, unchanging, and dead (lifeless??) environment.
Yay!!!
I knew it! The harmoniums are real!
...the entire planet is made up of liquid mercury! And maybe liquid mercury on Mercury is blueish!
The article has a "colourised" picture to highlight the features. I don't think the features are actually blue.........
the messenger site has the information
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/gallery/sciencePhotos/image.php?gallery_id=2&image_id=649
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
A little higher res and we will be able to make out the blue string soup
... if they were little pools of liquid mercury!
It's cheese!
"Gromit, that's it! Cheese! We'll go somewhere where there's cheese!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Those pits look a lot like erosion from plasma arcs.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
So, what properties do Mercury and the Moon share? They're pretty close to the same size (I suppose, though not really), and don't have (much of) an atmosphere. Other than that, there is a massive difference in temperature, density, gravity, radiation, and composition (at the very least). The moon, for instance, it mostly silicate, while Mercury is more metallic.
Oh yeah, and one is a planet while the other is a moon. Slight difference, I know, just thought I'd point it out.
PS anyone else ever get annoyed by how Wikipedia is inconsistent in how it lists statistics for planetary bodies? Drives me nuts when trying to make comparisons, or even just get useful information.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Lack of atmosphere,
Cratered surface
Approximately the same size.
Similar albedos
Rotation is in tidal resonance with their primary
Both covered with maria and evidence of lava flooding
Both potentially have water ice in their polar craters
Nothing alike at all!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Odd. It doesn't look blueish.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Amazing that probes now enable us to learn what the planets of our solar system are really like.
I predict that, within our lifetimes, the United States will routinely send astro-men into orbit and, perhaps, one day to the moon.
I guess what he's really trying to say here is "That's no moon"
And if you didn't see the joke coming, shame on you.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
But does it have matched luggage?
Come on, admit it. The weirdest little world in this solar system is by far the one infected with humans.
>> little pools of liquid mercury!
>> It's cheese!
It's Eggs , and they are ready to hatch . . .
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
And the densities are completely different, meaning that the composition and internal structure are entirely different.
When you think about it, the similarities of two planets depends upon the features that you characterize them by. So we say the Moon and Mercury look similar because of their cratered surface that is largely the by product of having no atmosphere. (And a few other factors.) We say that Earth and Mars look similar since they both show evidence of tectonic activity, volcanism, and erosion. (And a few other factors.) But the reality is that these are all very different places if we look at other features, like density (thus overall composition), the similarities become trivial.
Let's just say they are exactly the same except for the differences, and leave it at that.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
"I even like the chicken if the sauce is not too blue."
- ZZ Top
Have gnu, will travel.
Those blast points are too accurate for sand people ..
It reminds me of the superb 1971 film The Andromeda Strain directed by Robert Wise. The virus in the film came from space and under a microscope is seen to grow. The new image of Mercury in the National Geographic article looks eerily like the growing virus... Sadly I can't find an image for this at the moment.
Hooloovoo
A Hooloovoo is a hyperintelligent shade of the colour blue.
Little is known of them, except that one participated in the construction of the starship Heart of Gold. At the launching ceremony one was temporarily refracted into a free-standing prism. This is probably analogous to the ceremonial multicoloured lab coats worn by the rest of the team.
Makes that slashdot subscription worth every penny!
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Pictures would be nice
I suppose that there isn't really any great difference between any two random hominids, either.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
is it ..... MERCURY?
It could be selenium. Just make sure you order your collection robots forcefully enough or you'll be in the shit.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
"What's more, the hollows look distinctly fresh, because they haven't been reshaped by later impact events."
I don't pretend to know more than an astronomer, but doesn't the Sun catch a lot of things that would otherwise fly into Mercury ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
You could always just risk your life to get them to snap out of it.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
MESSENGER revealed an unexpected class of landform on Mercury and suggest that a previously unrecognized geological process is responsible for its formation. I'm not an astrophysicist. Doesn't "Geological" refer specifically to Earth? The "Geo" comes from "Gaea," the Greek personification of Earth. Mercury would be something like "Hermeticological" I would think. I got this from a sci-fi book (one of Heinlien's, if I recall correctly), so don't jump on me if it's incorrect.
Does anybody else think this resembles the result of putting a small, EMPTY, potato chip bag in the microwave for 3-4 seconds? The arcing on the metal instantly melts the plastic, which globs up due to surface tension and shrinks. Try it, you'll like it.
Did National Geographic take a close-up picture of my face while I was sleeping?
I just looked at the pictures of the blue hollows - and in addition to finding the landscape awfully regular, almost like a pattern of crystallization, it struck me that the layout of the hollows also looked a *lot* like the article from yesterday, about checking the pattern of radiation in your microwave oven.
Which leads to the question as to whether they're mapping microwave weather from the Sun.
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