Category: space art

Mercury in the Sky with Diamonds

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 4 Comments

Hello, friends!  Today’s post is mainly intended for Sci-Fi writers, but I’m hoping others will find it interesting, too.

Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun, perhaps the most overlooked and under-appreciated planet in the Solar System, may possess a precious and beautiful secret: diamonds.  So many diamonds!  Tiny diamonds may be scattered all across Mercury’s surface, with even more diamond buried deep, deep, deep underground.

Superficially, Mercury looks a lot like Earth’s moon.  They’re both rocky, airless worlds peppered with impact craters.  They’re both kind of grey, except Mercury is a darker shade of grey than the Moon.  That darker color is caused by graphite (the same graphite found in pencil lead).

For whatever reason, when Mercury first formed, it ended up with an overabundance of carbon (and an underabundance of stuff that would normally react with carbon).  As a result, carbon atoms combined with other carbon atoms to produce plain, simple graphite.

But as I said, Mercury (like the Moon) is covered with impact craters.  A whole lot of impact craters.  In fact, Mercury is the #1 most heavily cratered planet in the Solar System.  And so, whenever an asteroid or comet rammed full speed into Mercury, the force of that impact would have put Mercury’s graphite under sudden and extreme pressure—enough pressure to compress ordinary graphite into diamond.

According to one source I read (see the “want to learn more?” section below), there’s an estimated 16 quadrillion tons of diamond on Mercury’s surface.  That’s about 16 times more diamond than the estimated total amount of diamond we have here on Earth.  But wait, there’s more!  According to another source I read (again, see the “want to learn more?” section below), Mercury may also have a layer of pure diamond buried deep underground.  This diamond layer would be roughly 10 miles thick, and it would lie roughly 300 miles down.

Given that synthetic diamonds already exist, would Mercury’s superabundance of diamonds be worth anything in the distant future?  I don’t know, but I feel like there’s potential here for a Sci-Fi story.  Whenever I learn a weird and quirky science fact like this, I treat it like a writing prompt and see if any good Sci-Fi ideas come out of it.

But I don’t have any plans to write a story about diamond mining on Mercury, which is why I’m sharing this weird and quirky science fact here on the blog, so other Sci-Fi writers can read this and ponder over it.  The planet Mercury is brimming with diamonds—way, way more diamonds than we have here on Earth.  How would you use that science fact for science fiction?

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Here’s an article from Science News explaining how impact events on Mercury create diamonds on Mercury’s surface.

And here’s an article from Live Science explaining how a 10 mile thick layer of diamond might have formed deep beneath Mercury’s surface.

Also, I did another post on Mercury just a couple of weeks ago.  If you want to learn a few more fast facts about Mercury, click here.

The art featured in today’s post is my own original work.  If you like my art and want to support what I do on this blog, please consider visiting the I-Love-Space store on RedBubble.  Even if you don’t buy anything, just visiting and clicking the like button on some of my work would help me a lot (and obviously, if you do end up buying something, that would help me even more!).

Thank you, friends!

Mercury’s #1

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 9 Comments

Hello, friends!

I love Mercury.  He’s the planet closest to the Sun, which makes him the first planet of our Solar System.  Sadly, that seems to be the limit of what the average person knows about Mercury, so today I’d like to share just a few other ways Mercury wins first place.

First off, if there were a footrace among all the planets of the Solar System, Mercury would win.  Easily.  Mercury is the #1 fastest moving planet in the Solar System.  This has a lot to do with Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and Netwon’s law of universal gravitation, but I think I can explain this without digging into Kepler or Newton’s math.  Imagine you’re a planet and you don’t want to fall into the Sun.  You’ll need to keep moving to maintain your orbit.  The closer you are to the Sun, the more you’ll have to fight the Sun’s gravity, and thus the faster you’ll have to move.  Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun; ergo, he’s the fastest.  (If you’d like to learn more about the math behind planetary motion, click here.)

Since Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun, you might assume Mercury is also the hottest planet.  But no, Venus is hotter than Mercury (how that happened is a story for another time).  However, Mercury does have the #1 most extreme difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures.  Daytime temperatures climb as high as 430 degrees Celsius (800 degrees Fahrenheit).  At night, the temperature rapidly drops as low as -180 degrees Celsius (-290 degrees Fahrenheit).  Why?  Because Mercury has virtually no atmosphere.  Atmospheres are like insulating blankets for planets.  Without an atmosphere, Mercury can’t retain heat at all, so all the extreme heat Mercury gets during the day is immediately lost to the vacuum of space at night.  (To learn more about Mercury’s daytime vs. nighttime temperatures, click here.)

There are plenty more ways Mercury is #1, but I’m only going to share one more with you today.  Mercury is the #1 most heavily cratered planet in the Solar System.  How did that happen?  Well, once again, Mercury has no atmosphere, which means all the smaller meteoroids that would burn up in the atmospheres of other planets make it straight through to the ground on Mercury.  Additionally, there’s very little geological activity on Mercury.  No volcanic eruptions, no major earthquakes (mercuryquakes?)… at least not in the last 3.5 billion years.  On other worlds, geologic activity helps erode and erase old impact craters, but that’s not happening on Mercury.  So Mercury gets hit more easily and has a harder time erasing old impact craters.  Those two facts add up to Mercury having more impact craters today than any other planet in our Solar System.  (To learn more about Mercury’s overabundance of craters, click here.)

In my humble opinion, Mercury doesn’t get as much love as he deserves.  I don’t know why that is, but I hope this post has piqued your curiosity and helped you appreciate Mercury a little bit more.  At the time of this writing, the BepiColombo space probe (a joint venture by the European and Japanese space agencies) has completed several flybys of Mercury.  If all goes according to plan, BepiColombo should settle into orbit around Mercury in November of this year (2026).  Here’s hoping BepiColombo will discover even more reasons to love the first planet from the Sun.

The art is today’s post is my own original work.  If you like my art, please consider visiting the I-Love-Space store on RedBubble.  Even if you don’t buy anything, just visiting and clicking the “like” button on my work helps me a lot (and obviously, if you do decide to buy something, that helps me even more).  Thank you, friends!

Artemis II: She’s Not Like Other Missions

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 15 Comments

Hello, friends!

It’s been a couple weeks since Artemis II went to space, looped around the Moon, and returned safely to Earth.  One thing really surprised me during this mission: I didn’t hear many people whining about the cost.  Whenever important NASA stuff is in the news, I always hear a ton of people whining about the cost.  But this time, not so much!  Which leaves me wondering: why was Artemis II different?

The most obvious explanation is that while Artemis II was up in space, there was this other major news story happening down here on the ground.  Now this is not a political blog, and I don’t want to dwell on politics too long, but we can’t ignore the elephant in the room: the war.  Just before Artemis II launched, the U.S. started a war with Iran.  That war is wildly unpopular and also extravagantly expensive.  When we keep hearing about the government spending one or two billion dollars per day on the war, NASA’s budget of $24 billion per year doesn’t sound so bad.

But I don’t think that’s the only reason.  Space launches used to be rare and extraordinary events, but in the last few years, they’ve been normalized.  With private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin in the game, launches happen all the time now.  There were something like 300 launches worldwide last year!  Artemis II was still something new and different and very, very special; at the same time, though, it was just another rocket launch.  If we’re going to have 300 launches per year, it doesn’t seem outlandish for one of them to be a Moon mission.

Do you think I’m right about this?  Was your experience similar to mine, or did you hear more grumbling and griping about Artemis II’s price tag than I did?  Let me know in the comments below.

I will acknowledge that I did hear one complaint.  It was some political pundit who said something like: “NASA just sent billions of taxpayer dollars to the Moon!”  There’s plenty I could say in response to that, but that statement conjured such an amusing mental image in my head.  So I’m just going to leave you with this:

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

It wasn’t just me who felt like Artemis II was different.  According to this article from Forbes, the vast majority of Americans support the Artemis program and followed the Artemis II mission closely.

If you want to know more about NASA’s budget, check out this article from the Planetary Society.  It’s a great resource, not only for understanding NASA’s budget in particular, but for understanding the U.S. federal budgeting process as a whole.

And if you’re up for some more academic literature, here’s a research paper from the journal Space Policy examining how the federal government sometimes does (and sometimes does not) listen to public opinion regarding space exploration.

Betelgeuse and Siwarha

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 6 Comments

Hello, friends!

I love space, but I also love language and words and names, and I especially love it when people put thought and care into the naming of things.  Betelgeuse is a super famous supergiant star in the constellation Orion.  For as long as I can remember, it was generally assumed that Betelgeuse was a loner.  A single star, all by herself, with no binary companion.  But now it seems that Betelgeuse does have a very small, very faint companion star, which astronomers have (very aptly) named Siwarha.

Back in 2019/2020, astronomers noticed Betelgeuse start to flicker and dim.  There was a rapid 30% decrease in Betelgeuse’s brightness, leading to rampant speculation that Betelgeuse was about to go up in a supernova explosion.  That would have been an amazing sight for all of us here on Earth!  But then, nothing happened, and Betelgeuse’s brightness eventually went back to normal.

The Great Dimming of Betelgeuse, as this event is now called, was caused by something less spectacular than a supernova (less spectacular, but still interesting—check out the “want to learn more?” section below if you want to learn more).  Still, during the Great Dimming, Betelgeuse got a lot more attention from astronomers than usual, and astronomers started noticing patterns in her behavior—including a pattern that (based on reexamining historical records) seemed to repeat every 2100 days.

One possible explanation: maybe Betelgeuse has a companion star with an orbital period of 2100 days.  This hypothetical companion star was initially nicknamed “Betelbuddy.”  But then, in December of 2024, astronomers at the Gemini North Observatory in Hawaii were able to directly image “Betelbuddy” in mid-orbit.  At that point, Betelgeuse’s companion stopped being hypothetical, and somebody needed to give it a more official-sounding name.

Betelgeuse is an Arabic name (as most traditional star names are), and it means something like “the hand of the giant.”  The giant in question is, of course, Orion; however, the Arabic name for Orion is al Jawza, which is a female name from Arabian legend.  Therefore, since this newly discovered star circles round and round the hand of a lady giant, the Gemini North team proposed naming it “Siwarha,” meaning “her bracelet.”

How perfect is that?

Siwarha would have been hidden behind Betelguese during the Great Dimming, so it was not visible to Earth-based astronomers at that time, no matter how hard they looked for it.  Even after Siwarha emerged from behind Betelgeuse, spotting it stretched the limits of one of the very best telescopes in the world.  After crossing in front of Betelgeuse, Siwarha should appear again (on the opposite side of Betelgeuse) in late 2027, at which point astronomers should be able to learn much, much more about it.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Here’s a brief article published by NASA announcing the discovery of Siwarha.

And here’s a link to the actual research paper explaining how the Gemini North team detected Betelgeuse’s companion star.  The proposal to name it “Siwarha” is near the end of the paper.

As for the Great Dimming of Betelgeuse, it was caused by Betelgeuse burping a big, giant cloud of dust up into space, which partially obscured our view.  Click here to learn more about that.

P.S.: The art in today’s post is my own original work.  If you like my art, please consider visiting the I-Love-Space store on RedBubble.  Even if you don’t buy anything, just visiting and clicking the “like” button on some of my work helps me a lot (and if you do decide to buy something, that obviously helps me even more!).  Thank you!