AMERICANALMANAC (Charles McAdams) - Mercury shrinking 30 percent faster than scientists believed, new study finds
The smallest planet in our solar system is contracting far more rapidly than researchers estimated, with a new study revealing that impact debris has been hiding the true scale of Mercury's slow collapse for billions of years. Scientists at the German Aerospace Center's Institute of Space Research reported Thursday that Mercury's diameter may have shrunk […] The post Mercury shrinking 30 percent faster than scientists believed, new study finds appeared first on American Almanac .
The smallest planet in our solar system is contracting far more rapidly than researchers estimated, with a new study revealing that impact debris has been hiding the true scale of Mercury's slow collapse for billions of years. Scientists at the German Aerospace Center's Institute of Space Research reported Thursday that Mercury's diameter may have shrunk by as much as 14 miles, roughly 30 percent more than previous estimates suggested. The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters, upend decades of assumptions about how quickly the solar system's innermost planet has been cooling and contracting since it formed 4.5 billion years ago. The key discovery came down to what researchers could not see.…Open