Surprise: Mercury Has a Personality

Future photos to reveal planet's unseen regions

(NEWSER) - A NASA spacecraft has captured the first photo of Mercury taken from orbit. The first of yesterday’s 363 images, shown at left, show the planet’s south pole. The gray surface is covered with craters, including a 53-mile-wide one known as Debussy. Other photos from the $464 million Messenger probe will likely reveal previously-unseen parts of the planet, Space.com reports; it's expected to circle the planet for a year. More»

Messenger spacecraft reveals planets core still molten

(NEWSER) - The planet Mercury is shrinking, the LA Times reports. Data from NASA’s Mercury Messenger spacecraft reveal that the planet’s diameter has shrunk by a mile over its history, probably because its core is cooling. Messenger flew in for a close-up in January, and scientists are now piecing together the new information and re-evaluating some long-held beliefs about the planet. More»

Messenger data surprising scientists

(NEWSER) - Mercury is anything but the boring "burnt-out cinder" scientists once believed it was, say researchers analyzing data from NASA's Messenger orbiter. The spacecraft has now spent 88 days—one Mercurian year—circling the planet, and has sent back about 20,000 new pictures that strongly suggest that ice coats parts of the permanently shadowed craters near the planet's poles, reports the Los Angeles Times . More»

For every two suns, an Earth-like planet

(NEWSER) - Exciting news for alien enthusiasts: The discovery by NASA scientists of a vast trove of Earth-like planets orbiting distant suns boosts our chances of finding extraterrestrial life. Findings from the Kepler telescope revealed that for every two stars in the universe, one has an Earth-like "candidate planet" orbiting it, the Telegraph reports. Says a chief Kepler scientist, "I am really delighted that we are seeing so many candidate planets and that means there is a rich ocean of planets out there to explore." Before this, just two potentially habitable planets had been discovered outside our solar system. More»

(NEWSER) - Scientists have discovered a colossal ring around Saturn, the biggest planetary ring yet found. It's enormous even by solar system standards: Among the analogies being used to make it clear to our little earthly minds is that it would take 1 billion Earths to fill it. "This thing is just immense," one astronomer tells Space.com. "If you look at just a small patch of it, you just see fuzziness." More»