Weird Wednesday: Mercury

By Leon Stevens on August 28, 2024

As a kid, I used to visit my grandparent's farm. It wasn't a farm anymore, but it had old barns, old rusting equipment with trees growing through it, and the coolest thing ever...

Mercury.

Yeah, that silvery liquid metal which flowed around the pie plate that I poured it into. It looked cool in water too.

I know what you're thinking.

Did I know it was hazardous? I don't think I did until much later when I looked it up in the encyclopedia. Yup. An encyclopedia...

But we are not talking about element 80 today. Since last week we visited Mars, I thought we should give all the planets some attention.

Facts about Mercury:

The temperature during the day can reach 430 C (800 F), and at night, temperatures plummet to -180 C (-290 F)
Saturn's moon Titan and Jupiter's moon Ganymede are both larger than Mercury.
Mercury speeds around the sun every 88 Earth days.
In 2012, NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft discovered water ice inside some of Mercury's craters.
Mercury has a faint tail like a comet due to the solar wind blowing off particles from its surface. So, it's getting smaller.
Magnetic tornados. It's got those. You don't want to get your credit cards to close.

The most famous movie about Mercury that I've never heard about?

Hmm.

-Leon

My newsletter goes out every Wednesday: Lines by Leon Super Newsletter Extravaganza

Leon Stevens is a multi-genre author, composer, guitarist, songwriter, and an artist, with a Bachelor of Music and Education. He published his first book of poetry, Lines by Leon: Poems, Prose, and Pictures in January 2020, followed by a book of original classical guitar compositions, Journeys, and a short story collection of science fiction/post-apocalyptic tales called The Knot at the End of the Rope and Other Short Stories. His newest publications are the novella trilogy, The View from Here, which is a continuation of one of his short stories, and a new collection of poetry titled, A Wonder of Words.

My new book page: http://books.linesbyleon.com/