Mercury is still shrinking after billions of years: How its giant cooling core is cracking the planet’s thin crust
- Image AI generatedMercury is the smallest planet in the Solar System, only slightly larger than Earth's Moon, but what lies beneath its battered surface is anything but small.
- Its metallic core stretches out to nearly 85 per cent of the planet's total radius, leaving behind a rocky shell so thin it barely qualifies as a shell at all.
- Over billions of years, as that core has cooled, the whole planet has contracted, and its brittle crust has had to absorb the strain, buckling into cliffs and ridges hundreds of kilometres long.
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- Image AI generatedMercury is the smallest planet in the Solar System, only slightly larger than Earth's Moon, but what lies beneath its battered surface is anything but small.
- Its metallic core stretches out to nearly 85 per cent of the planet's total radius, leaving behind a rocky shell so thin it barely qualifies as a shell at all.
- Over billions of years, as that core has cooled, the whole planet has contracted, and its brittle crust has had to absorb the strain, buckling into cliffs and ridges hundreds of kilometres long.
Sources: Times of India