Mercury

Studying an atomic clock on-board a spacecraft inside the orbit of Mercury and very near to the Sun could be the trick to uncovering the nature of dark matter.

An international team of scientists has proved that Mercury, our solar system's smallest planet, has geomagnetic storms similar to those on Earth. Their finding, a first, answers the question of whether other planets, including those outside our solar system, can have geomagnetic storms regardless of the size of their magnetosphere or whether they have an Earth-like ionosphere.

A new study disputes the prevailing hypothesis on why Mercury has a big core relative to its mantle. For decades, scientists argued that hit-and-run collisions blew away much of Mercury's rocky mantle and left the big, dense, metal core inside. But new research reveals that collisions are not to blame -- instead, the density, mass and iron content of a rocky planet's core is influenced by its […]

Geoscientists have found the largest extraterrestrial diamonds ever discovered - a few tenths of a millimeter in size nevertheless - inside meteorites. Together with an international team of researchers, they have now been able to prove that these diamonds formed in the early period of our solar system when minor planets collided together or with large asteroids. These new data disprove the […]

Despite Mercury's 400-degree Celsius daytime heat, there is ice at its caps. And now a study shows how that Vulcan scorch probably helps the planet closest to the sun make some of that ice.