Ice On Mercury? At 400° Celsius? Yes!

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Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun. It has no atmosphere. It is constantly flooded with solar wind and its surface is regularly heated up to hundreds of degrees Celsius. Yet there is water there and in the form of ice nonetheless. How?

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Image by 024-657-834 from Pixabay

Mercury was known even by the ancient Greeks in 400 BC. They did make a tiny mistake though – they thought of it as two separate objects. At dawn, they called it Apollo and at dusk Hermés. The name we use – Mercury – comes from Roman mythology but really they just renamed the Greek version.

Mercury is the smallest planet of the Solar system. Its really small – just about a half larger than our Moon. Yet, we can observe it with a naked eye. Just wake-up early, before the Sun gets above the horizon or wait until dusk. Because Mercury never goes too far away from the Sun terrestrial telescopes aren't great at observing Mercury. We had the wait until the MESSENGER probe to really get a good look at it.

High Temperature Ice

Mercury doesn't really have an atmosphere – one reason for that is because the strong solar wind blows everything away. Your average guy would likely call the atmosphere a vacuum but physicists are adamant on calling it an atmosphere as devices detected a few atoms of potassium, sodium, oxygen, hydrogen, helium,… But there is so little atmosphere there that heat doesn't get transferred in it. So, the surface temperature varies between 180° Celsius and 430°C. So, let's reiterate – almost vacuum, surface burning up because of the closeness of the Sun, strong solar winds – that likely makes the idea of water or even ice quite absurd.

But, the thing is that is exactly what the Mariner 10 probe and the seventy-meter-long antennas in Goldstone, California found. And now scientists Brant Jones and Thom Orlando may have solved the mystery. In the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters, they described chemical phenomena during which (quite paradoxically) high temperature plays a role.

Chemically, it isn't anything complicated. Minerals in the surface of Mercury include hydroxyl groups that get released because of the heat and solar wind. The main reasons are the solar wind and its protons. The electrically charged hydroxyl groups are dissolving to turn into molecules of water and hydrogen. Of course, many of the water molecules are again dissolved by the solar wind but some get carried by the solar wind closer to the poles into the shade of the craters there.

And as we said, there is no real atmosphere there, thus nothing that would conduct heat. That allows the water molecules to aggregate in places where solar radiation doesn't reach. This is a one way trip for the water molecules as they have no chance of ever getting out of the shade. Because Mercury doesn't have a true atmosphere its sky is pitch black and doesn't reflect solar rays. That is the simple and logical explanation of why we see small ice oases on the planet closest to the Sun. The scientists think that over three million years about 11,023,111,000 tons of ice could have been created this way.

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