No, it's not a new movie sequel starring Bruce Willis, it's a piece of speculation about the inner most planet. According to scientists, the rapidly cooling metallic core of the planet might be making the whole planet 'shrink'.
"It's a pretty cool thing," said Mark Robinson, a Northwestern University researcher, of Mercury's slow contraction. "When I first heard it, I thought it
was weird."But the theory is based on images from NASA's Mariner 10 mission in the 1970s that show randomly strewn scarps across half of Mercury, where the surface appears to have buckled from within. Scientists hope that a new spacecraft -- MESSENGER -- will shed new light on both Mercury's surface as well as its metallic core.
Robinson, a science team member with the MESSENGER mission, said the spacecraft will give researchers a chance to look for signs of surface buckling on Mercury's hidden hemisphere, as well as collect surface composition data on material that may have once spewed out of the planet's interior.
So it's a bit of a fluff piece for science, but unless they discover alien civilizations on Mars, it's going to be hard for space stories to push the Olympics off the front page for the next few nights.
- Art Neuro
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