Alex McColgan

speaker

29,301 appearances 104 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 21 Sep

Alex McColgan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 68 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 11.

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Astrum Space · We Found Something on Mercury That No One Expected · 5 Sep 2026 podcast

Those floors turn into coal traps that are among the coldest places in the entire solar system. voice-verified

Even though surrounding polar regions can reach up to 226 degrees Celsius, marked here in red, the coal traps marked in blue stay at a glacial minus 128 degrees Celsius. voice-verified

And even more shockingly, there's tentative but tantalizing. voice-verified

evidence that some of these very craters might contain frozen water. voice-verified

How it got there is one of Mercury's most compelling mysteries, and one we'll come back to a little later. voice-verified

But first, here's something else hiding in plain sight on Mercury's surface. voice-verified

Something that suggests this dead planet might not be so dead after all. voice-verified

For decades, everyone assumed Mercury was an ancient scarred rock baking in the sun. voice-verified

Whatever violence had marked its surface was surely billions of years old. voice-verified

But a new 2026 study led by Valentin Bickel from the University of Bern found something in the planet's crust that flipped this assumption completely on its head. voice-verified

Even though Messenger was decommissioned in 2015, researchers are still sifting through its data more than a decade later, and thanks to new data analysis techniques and better technology, new findings are still emerging. voice-verified

For example, we now think that Mercury's surface might actually be geologically active, and as young as a few hundred thousand years old in some places. voice-verified

You see, scattered across Mercury's surface are hundreds of bright streaks called ligner, running down into the steep inner slopes of craters. voice-verified

They're hundreds to thousands of meters long, less than twenty meters tall, and they appear geologically young. voice-verified

Their edges are crisp, and no small craters have formed on top of them. voice-verified

Whatever made them, it didn't happen in the distant past. voice-verified

These are recent scars. voice-verified

Scientists had noticed them in Messenger data before, but had so far not been able to explain them. voice-verified

So Bickel and his team decided to apply machine learning to analyze one hundred and twelve thousand high resolution messenger images, systematically analysing four hundred and two linee for any patterns that might emerge. voice-verified

We have these modern data science approaches now, machine learning, deep learning, that help us look into all those old datasets and find completely new science discoveries in them, Bickel said. voice-verified

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