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Astronomy on Mercury is the sky as viewed from the planet Mercury. ... This is due to the high eccentricity of Mercury's orbit around the Sun. [1]
Mercury is one of four terrestrial planets in the Solar System, which means it is a rocky body like Earth. It is the smallest planet in the Solar System, with an equatorial radius of 2,439.7 kilometres (1,516.0 mi). [4] Mercury is also smaller—albeit more massive—than the largest natural satellites in the Solar System, Ganymede and Titan.
The orbit of the planet Mercury lies interior to that of the Earth, and thus it can come into an inferior conjunction with the Sun. When Mercury is near the node of its orbit, it passes through the orbital plane of the Earth. If an inferior conjunction occurs as Mercury is passing through its orbital node, the planet can be seen to pass across ...
Animated explanation of the mechanics of a retrograde orbit of a planet Archived 2013-10-05 at the Wayback Machine, University of South Wales; NASA: Mars retrograde motion; Double sunrises, 3DS Max Animation – illustrating the case of Mercury (the animation of an imaginary apparent retrograde motion of the Sun as seen from Earth begins at 1:35)
The maneuver put the spacecraft on course to enter orbit around Mercury late next year. The spacecraft holds two orbiters, one for Europe and the other for Japan, that will circle the planet's poles.
Transit of Mercury on November 8, 2006 with sunspots #921, 922, and 923 The perihelion precession of Mercury. Under Newtonian physics, an object in an (isolated) two-body system, consisting of the object orbiting a spherical mass, would trace out an ellipse with the center of mass of the system at a focus of the ellipse.
It showed that the peculiarities in Mercury's orbit were the results of the curvature of spacetime caused by the mass of the Sun. [27] This added a predicted 0.1 arc-second advance of Mercury's perihelion each orbital revolution, or 43 arc-seconds per century, exactly the observed amount (without any recourse to the existence of a hypothetical ...
In 20 cases, Mercury goes into a dangerous orbit and often ends up colliding with Venus or plunging into the Sun. Moving in such a warped orbit, Mercury's gravity is more likely to shake other planets out of their settled paths: In one simulated case, Mercury's perturbations sent Mars heading toward Earth. [13]