US media said that the temperature on the surface of Mercury is enough to melt lead, and it may have contained ingredients needed for the survival of life in the past. That's a pretty big question mark, though.
According to a report on the US " New York Times " website on March 24, this new view published in the British "Scientific Reports" magazine last week is based on a particularly chaotic feature of the planet closest to the sun, the so-called "chaotic terrain." On Mercury, cracked rocks, jagged peaks, and sunken craters make up a broken, jagged, and chaotic landscape.
For nearly 50 years, scientists have thought that when a giant asteroid struck the far side of Mercury, it quickly triggered earthquakes across the planet, creating chaotic terrain.
But new research led by Alexis Rodriguez of the Planetary Science Institute upends that view. New research shows that the chaotic terrain could not have been caused by a planetary collision because it did not appear until 2,000 years after the crater was formed.
Additionally, Rodriguez and colleagues found that areas within the chaotic terrain appear to have sunk, and that layer of crust beneath the surface appears to have disappeared.
The simplest explanation is that subsurface volatiles—components that easily convert from solids to liquids or gases—are heated by the intrusion of underlying magma. This causes these components to turn into gases, forcing the surface's terrain to become cluttered.
Deborah Domingue of the institute said: "Suppose my house is built on pillars, and then I remove one of the pillars. My house will tilt, right? That's what happens on Mercury."
Paul Haine, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who was not involved in the study, also believes that the long-unchallenged common explanation for Mercury's chaotic terrain is likely wrong. He also pointed out that the new theory is consistent with what scientists have observed on Mars, and that the release of volatiles is likely to lead to the formation of similar terrain on Mars.
This is an exciting possibility because volatiles - especially water - are the conditions for life to emerge. Domingue said that while the team isn't sure what volatiles are present on Mercury, there's reason to believe water could be one of them.
This discovery refutes the idea that Mercury is uninhabitable. So close to the sun, Mercury's surface reaches temperatures of about 427 degrees Celsius during the day. At night, because Mercury has no atmosphere to store heat, its surface temperature plummets to about minus 179 degrees Celsius.
However, within a short distance below Mercury's surface, temperatures are much cooler and even suitable - at least for some life forms, says study co-author Jeffrey Kogel.
Kegel said: "As long as there is water, the temperature will be suitable for the birth and survival of life. This is possible." But at the beginning, even he did not believe this.
He said of Rodriguez: "I thought there was an element of Alexis's idea that wasn't true. But the deeper I dug into the geological evidence and the more I thought about the chemical and physical environment there, the more I realized that the idea might be a little crazy, but it wasn't completely crazy."
But Hein thinks it's unlikely that water was the cause. The only situation in which this possibility holds true is if the water is attached to rocks. "There may be fleeting pockets of high water activity, but I don't think you're going to see a lot of giant pools and underground lakes or anything like that," he said. Still, signs that water might exist on planets like Mercury provide important clues to the search for life in our galaxy. Astronomers have discovered thousands of planets orbiting other stars - some of which look similar to Mercury.
Rodriguez said: "If this happens on Mercury, it will happen on other planets."
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