Author: Carolyn Gramling / Source: Science News
The smallest planet in our solar system has a massive solid inner core.
In its final trip around Mercury before crash-landing in 2015, NASA’s MESSENGER mission zoomed in close to the planet, enabling scientists to make detailed measurements of its gravity, spin and internal structure. Those data, researchers report April 10 in Geophysical Research Letters, suggest Mercury has a solid inner core about 2,000 kilometers in diameter, making up about half of Mercury’s entire core.
Scientists already knew that Mercury’s core was huge, taking up about 85 percent of the planet (SN:…
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