(MENAFN- Qatar News Agency) New evidence from a NASA spacecraft upholds the long-held hypothesis that Mercury has large reservoirs of frozen water around its poles, according to German press agency dpa. The discovery will help scientists understand Mercury and might shed light on the origins of Earth.
Messenger, a NASA probe that has orbited the hot, rocky planet for one and a half years, found excess amounts of hydrogen consistent with pure water ice, the findings published in three articles in Science show. While Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, is an unlikely place to contain ice, the evidence suggests that the small planet's poles contain areas that can hold frozen water.
The polar areas are never reached by sunlight because Mercury's axis does not tilt. "Regions that we see in permanent shadow from our spacecraft have been in permanent shadow for millions, hundreds of millions, probably billions of years," said Sean Solomon, Messenger principal investigator, in a podcast for Science. "And in those permanently shadowed regions, it is very cold." Solomon said the temperature in these permanently shadowed regions, called "cold traps," stays around 180 degrees below zero Celsius.
The other factor contributing to the presence of frozen water is a curious dark matter the probe found in certain areas, which provides an insulating layer of a few centimetres over the ice.
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