Mercury’s Sodium Tail

That’s no comet. Below the Pleiades critical particular person cluster is de facto a planet: Mercury. Long exposures of our Solar Draw’s innermost planet may presumably well articulate something surprising: a tail. Mercury’s thin atmosphere incorporates diminutive amounts of sodium that glow when mad by gentle from the Sun. Daylight also liberates these molecules from Mercury’s floor and pushes them away. The yellow glow from sodium, in voice, is comparatively lustrous. Pictured, Mercury and its sodium tail are viewed in a deep image taken final week from La Palma, Spain through a filter that primarily transmits yellow gentle emitted by sodium. First predicted in the 1980s, Mercury’s tail used to be first found in 2001. Many tail details had been published in extra than one observations by NASA’s robotic MESSENGER spacecraft that orbited Mercury between 2011 and 2015. Tails, finally, are continuously connected with comets.