Observing Mercury’s Brilliant Flares from Earth
Researchers make the first short-term observation of sodium flares in Mercury’s exosphere.
By Emily Underwood 9 August 2017
Mercury has no thick, gaseous atmosphere to protect it from the Sun. Instead, it has an exosphere: a thin covering of escaped atoms that is continuously formed as several processes (for example, solar irradiation, the influx of solar wind plasma, and temperature variations) extract volatile elements off the planet’s surface. The relative composition of the exosphere varies depending on where Mercury is located in its highly elliptical orbit and on how strongly the planet’s magnetic field couples with the solar wind.
https://eos.org/research-spotlights/observing-mercurys-brilliant-flares-from-earth
