The mystery of Mercury’s excessively dark surface may have just been solved.
A team of researchers working at Brown University say the planet’s inky appearance may be the result of a near constant rain of impacts from tiny specks of cometary dust that “painted” the planet black over billions of years.
The research was published Monday in Nature Geoscience.
Scientists have wondered why Mercury was so much darker than our moon –reflecting just one-third of the amount of light that the moon reflects.
The two bodies are often compared, explained lead author Megan Bruck Syal, of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Calif. They are similar in size, and because neither one has much of an atmosphere, they are both subject to bombardments of space dust and other micrometeorites.
On Earth, micrometeorites burn up in the atmosphere, causing shooting stars.
Many airless bodies get their dark color from iron-bearing minerals on their surface, but that is not the case with Mercury. NASA’s Messenger spacecraft has shown that the surface of Mercury is less than 2 percent iron.
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