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Questions tagged [mercury]

Questions about Mercury, the first planet from Earth's sun. Also the smallest major planet in the Solar System.

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Did simultaneous transits of Mercury and Venus actually last occur in 373,173 BC?

According to the Wikipedia article for Transit of Venus, the last time a transit of Mercury and a transit of Venus occurred at the same time was 22 September of 373,173 BC. This is a Featured Article ...
Johansson McFleppers's user avatar
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Measured values of the solar irradiance at other values than 1 AU?

It is straight forward to estimate the total solar irradiance of a planet using the Earth's solar constant, and scaling it according to the (mean) distance of the planets. But for which planets have ...
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Gravity on Mercury's highest elevation?

This post answers what is Mars' gravity at its highest point (Olympus Mons) compared to the Earth's and Mars' standard, it's 0.3736 g (Mars standard is 0.3794 g). This also seems to be the lowest ...
John's user avatar
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How did Arecibo make radar images of ice on Mercury's poles?

update: I still haven't been able to get my hands on the Icarus paper linked below (I'll try other libraries) but these are newer and quite interesting!: Constraining the thickness of polar ice ...
uhoh's user avatar
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3 votes
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What is the temperature under the surface of Mercury?

What is the temperature under the surface of Mercury? I know at the surface the temperature varies greatly (-297 F to 801 F). I also realize that the answer would likely depend on depth. Do we know ...
Jonathan's user avatar
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Surface composition of Mercury?

I've been doing research on the surface composition of Mercury, but it doesn't seem that there are many helpful results online from ArXiv. One article from PNAS describes the composition of Mercury as ...
WarpPrime's user avatar
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How to write a normalized, dimensionless form of Binet's relativistic equation?

$$\frac{\delta^2 u}{\delta \theta^2} + u = \frac{\mu}{h^2} + 3 \mu u^2$$ This is Binet's relativistic equation. Here $u = 1/r$ where $r$ is the radial distance, and $\mu$ is the reduced mass of the ...
zircon's user avatar
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Is the asteroid belt made up of Mercury's former crust?

Mercury has an unusual composition: It seems to consist mostly of metal, which is otherwise common in the cores of planets. Also, Mercury's rocks are rich in volatile materials, which could not have ...
AlgebraicsAnonymous's user avatar
1 vote
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278 views

Calculating Angle Between Two Planets In Heliocentric Orbit

My goal is to calculate the retrograde of Mercury. What I've been working from is the book, Practical Astronomy With Your Calculator 3rd edition. I've made some progress, but I seem to be stuck with ...
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