What’s closest to the sun must be hot. Yes, being 58 million kilometers away makes it pretty hot. And mercury, as the guy in this video says, is also super cool. One way it’s cool that I know is because one day on mercury the sun rises, stops in mid day and goes back to where it came from. Now if that’s not cool, there’s more.
Mercury zips past pretty fast. If you are able to locate it, you’ll see that it moves past the stars pretty quickly, as you keep an eye on it. It makes a complete orbit in just 88 days. That’s about 1.5 mercury days in a year. Imagine having a birthday almost every other day!
That’s because it is so close to the sun. That means it takes a much faster movement to prevent it from collapsing into the sun. Interestingly, the mercury, when seen through a good telescope, with a great amount of patience can be seen to change phases, just like the moon does. But it’s not easy to make that kind of an observation.
It also has the most elliptical orbit. And through out the year it can move from just 40 million kilometres away from the sun to more than 70 million kilometres away. That’s some change of seasons. More in the crashcourse video below: