Alex McColgan
speaker
29,581 appearances
105 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard yesterday
Alex McColgan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 69 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 11.
Appearances
And what they found was striking.
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90% of Linnae are located within craters, and they show a strong preference for the equator-facing side of crater slopes, the side that receives the most direct sunlight.
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That asymmetry was key to developing a new theory to explain their formation.
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Bickel proposed that volatile substances, sulfur and other light elements, are trapped beneath Mercury's thin.
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Volcanic crust.
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When a meteorite punches through that crust and creates a crater, it exposes the volatile rich layer underneath.
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Solar radiation then warms the exposed material, driving those volatiles to the surface where they drip down the crater walls and leave behind the characteristic bright streaks.
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It will explain why the streaks are mainly seen on the sun facing side of the craters and why they appear as newer features.
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If this is true, a planet we'd assume to be geologically dead is actually alive and kicking, and continuously losing material from its interior in an active, ongoing process.
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So, what exactly is going on inside Mercury?
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To really understand what's driving this planet, we need to look deeper, all the way down to its core.
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And what better way to do that than by measuring the planet's magnetic field?
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Luckily, Pepi Colombo has already done so.
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But alongside the conventional magnetosphere map, arose a few surprises too.
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Mercury's core is a bit of an enigma.
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It takes up about 85% of the planet's radius, and yet only generates a magnetic field 1% the strength of Earth's.
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It's also slightly off-center, tilted away from the planet's geographic equator in a way that no existing model fully explains.
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Plus, the magnetosphere is so tiny, it only took the spacecraft 30 minutes to fly through it.
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So, why does the magnetic field even matter?
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Well, for starters, it's a way to probe what might be concealed within the depths of Mercury's core directly.
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Showing 2721–2740 of 29,581 · page 137 of 1480
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