What type of impact created Mercury’s giant core and thin crust? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated the impact processes that caused Mercury to lose a large chunk of its crust and mantle, resulting in its core comprising 70 percent of the planet’s mass and leaving a very small crust and mantle. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of Mercury, along with other planetary bodies throughout the solar system.
For the study, the researchers used a series of computer models to simulate different types of impact collisions that could have occurred early in Mercury’s history, resulting in its abnormally large core. This study comes as researchers have long hypothesized that Mercury’s lost chunk of crust and mantle occurred from a large impact body. However, the researchers found that the impact body might have been much smaller, and perhaps the same size as Mercury. This challenges longstanding notions about Mercury’s formation while also questioning the processes that could have created other planetary bodies throughout the solar system.
“Our work is based on the finding, made in previous simulations, that collisions between very unequal bodies are extremely rare events,” said Dr. Patrick Franco, who is an astronomy with the National Observatory in Brazil and lead author of the study. “Collisions between objects of similar masses are more common, and the objective of the study was precisely to verify whether these collisions would be capable of producing a planet with the characteristics observed in Mercury.”
While Mercury remains one of the most mysterious planetary objects in the solar system, it also remains one of the least explored. This is because its close distance to the Sun makes it very difficult to send spacecraft there due to the Sun’s extreme gravitational influence. However, studies like this demonstrate that scientists can study Mercury without sending a spacecraft there, but the researchers note that several missions are in the pipeline to travel to Mercury and continue to unlock its secrets.
What new discoveries about Mercury’s formation will scientists make in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
Sources: Nature Astronomy, EurekAlert!
Featured Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Arizona State University/Carnegie Institution of Washington
