What is the planet Mercury like?
Mercury is the smallest of the nine planets and we would expect the little fellow to be closest to Father Sun, the starry parent of our Solar System. In fact, the outstanding features of Mercury are caused by its closeness to the sun. No other planet is so dominated by our mighty sun. The average distance between Mercury and the sun is 36 million miles and our average distance is 93 million miles. The little planet, then, gets almost three times more of the sun’s seething heat and dazzling light. It also feels three times more of the sun’s mighty pull of gravity. You would expect it to suffer. blistering, daytime temperatures. And so it does. But daylight falls on only half, the same half of the small planet. The other side faces away from the sun and knows only the cold and the mysterious darkness of eternal night. Mercury has the hottest spot of any planet in our Solar System. Conditions on the day side and the night side are vastly different, but spacemen from earth would find both
Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun in our solar system. This means that, unsurprisingly, it is both very hot when in view of the sun and also zapped by much radiation that would make life on the planet surely not possible! It is not the smallest planet due to the discovery of Pluto, but is still very small. It also orbits very quickly and the name Mercury pays homage to this fact. We don’t know an awful lot about the planet and it is hard to study, though the ball of rock is fried by the sun and is very hot during its day and freezing cold during its night time.
