Welcome, everybody! Today, I shall discuss the second-hottest planet in the Solar System - so let's get going!
 |
| Mercury, photographed by the MESSENGER probe in 2008. (Yes, that was its name. Its backronym is even stranger!) As usual, my picture source is Wikipedia. |
Facts about Mercury
Highest temperature: 100 K (-173 °C)Lowest temperature: 700 K (427 °C)
Average distance from Sun: 57,909,050 km
Year length: 87.9 Earth days
Solar day length: ≈176 Earth days (2 Mercurian years)
Surface area: 74,800,000 km2 (smaller than the Old World - Europe, Africa and Asia)
Gravity: 3.7 m/s2 (38% of Earth's)
Mass: 330,110 quintillion kg (0.55% of Earth's!)
Surface pressure: barely anything (around 0.0000000005 pascals)
Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun. Named after the Roman messenger god, this bare sun-baked rock sits 60% closer to the Sun than Earth does and regularly gets fried by the huge ball of plasma. It is, in fact, smaller than two moons in the Solar System - Jupiter's Ganymede and Saturn's Titan!
Like the Moon, Mercury is covered in craters of all sizes. (But not all shapes!) From this fact, we can figure out that the planet's surface is extremely old. But because all knowledge on Mercury's surface had previously been based on data from Mariner 10, which visited the planet in 1975, it is in fact the least well-known out of all of the inner planets. Even less well-known than Venus!
But that will of course change. Astronomers are still going over the data from the MESSENGER probe gained during the four years that it orbited Mercury from 2011 to 2015 - and with each time the pictures are looked over, something new seems to pop up!
But that's all I really have to say about Mercury. There's just not much we know about the planet. But we're still constantly learning about it, so don't worry about that!
So. Pokémon Sun and Moon are coming out on the 23rd, and I will definitely be playing Sun. So I was deciding what my plan would be with the blog while I played it.
Remember when Paper Mario: Color Splash came out? I didn't actually post on the blog that Sunday - I was busy playing it so I could review it. And, as I'm sure you're guessing now... I will not be posting on the blog until I have completed a review of Pokémon Sun, whenever that may be.
I do plan on having this review complete by the 18th of December. And trust me, it was a tough decision to just put my blog on hold. But in doing that, it gives me more time to play Pokémon Sun - so that I can get the review out faster!
That is all I have to say. So, until I complete Pokémon Sun and write a review from it, this is me saying goodbye - and I will see you next when the review goes up! Stay safe until then!