Why hasn’t the sun vaporized Mecury yet?
In: Physics
Mercury is losing heat to space from the side that isn’t facing the sun.
And the stuff that would vaporize and get blown away by the solar winds has already done so.
Because it’s not close enough. Mercury’s surface temperature reaches “only” 427 °C which isn’t enough to vaporize solid ground.
The visualization of distance and size in space is very distorted because most images don’t represent actual size and distances accurately (and still be “useful”).
The sun is large (very large) and Mercury is the closest planet to the sun. While this is true, relative to the size of the sun, the distance between them is very very large. The sun’s diameter is 1.4 million kilometers. The distance from the sun to Mercury is about 60m kilometers (this is over 40 time the diameter). So if you make the sun the size of a basketball, Mercury is around 10meters (30+ feet) away in relative terms.
Fun Fact: Venus is hotter than Mercury, due to the high levels of CO2 its the atmosphere. Hot enough to melt lead.
Vaporisation is turning liquids into an aerosolised form.
The planet Mercury is not actually a liquid, and therefore cannot be vaporised.
while its close its not close enough for surface temperatures to have the threat of vaporization
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