Surprise! Dust Ring Discovered in Mercury's Orbit
By Mike Wall 8 hours ago
Artist's illustration showing several dust rings circling the sun, formed by the gravitational tugs of orbiting planets. Recently, scientists discovered a dust ring at Mercury's orbit and concluded that Venus' ring likely originates from a group of as-yet-undiscovered co-orbital asteroids.(Image: © Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith/NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)
Two dusty discoveries may shake up our understanding of the inner solar system.
Mercury shares its supertight orbit with a big ring of wandering dust, a recent study suggests. And a cloud of as-yet-undiscovered asteroids likely gave rise to a similar halo in Venus' neighborhood, another new paper concludes.
"It's not every day you get to discover something new in the inner solar system," Marc Kuchner, a co-author of the Venus study and an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. "This is right in our neighborhood."
A ring very close to the sun
Both Earth and Venus have collected co-orbiting dust rings, as the planets have shepherded the particles with powerful gravitational tugs. Mercury's path, however, was thought to be free of such a feature.
More:
https://www.space.com/dust-ring-discovered-mercury-orbit.html?utm_source=notification
