What is the average daytime temperature on mercury

Location Help. Customize Your Weather. Privacy Policy. The Planet Mercury Weather. Current Hazards. Local Radar. Rivers and Lakes. Climate and Past Weather. Weather Story. Weather Map. Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Follow us on YouTube. Disclaimer Information Quality Help Glossary. Average distance from Sun. Sidereal Rotation. Length of Day. Sidereal Revolution. But strangely enough, it is not. Not only that, but Mercury is also cold enough in some regions to maintain water in ice form.

Overall, Mercury experiences considerable variations in temperatures, ranging from the extremely hot to the extremely cold. All of this arises from the fact that Mercury has an extremely thin atmosphere, as well as the nature of its orbit.

Whereas the side facing the Sun experiences temperatures hot enough to melt lead, the darkened areas are cold enough to freeze water. Mercury has the most eccentric orbit of any planet in the Solar System 0. Because of this, its distance from the Sun varies between 46 million km 29 million mi at its closest perihelion to 70 million km 43 million mi at its farthest aphelion.

And with an average orbital velocity of While there are large areas of smooth terrain, there are also cliffs, some hundreds of miles long and soaring up to a mile high. They rose as the planet's interior cooled and contracted over the billions of years since Mercury formed. Most of Mercury's surface would appear greyish-brown to the human eye. The bright streaks are called "crater rays.

The tremendous amount of energy that is released in such an impact digs a big hole in the ground, and also crushes a huge amount of rock under the point of impact. Some of this crushed material is thrown far from the crater and then falls to the surface, forming the rays. Fine particles of crushed rock are more reflective than large pieces, so the rays look brighter.

The space environment — dust impacts and solar-wind particles — causes the rays to darken with time. Temperatures on Mercury are extreme. During the day, temperatures on the surface can reach degrees Fahrenheit degrees Celsius. Because the planet has no atmosphere to retain that heat, nighttime temperatures on the surface can drop to minus degrees Fahrenheit minus degrees Celsius.

Mercury may have water ice at its north and south poles inside deep craters, but only in regions in permanent shadows. In those shadows, it could be cold enough to preserve water ice despite the high temperatures on sunlit parts of the planet.

Instead of an atmosphere, Mercury possesses a thin exosphere made up of atoms blasted off the surface by the solar wind and striking meteoroids. Mercury's exosphere is composed mostly of oxygen, sodium, hydrogen, helium, and potassium. Mercury's magnetic field is offset relative to the planet's equator.

When the ions strike the surface, they knock off neutrally charged atoms and send them on a loop high into the sky. Mercury Poster. All planets have temperature changes related to their seasons; some changes are more extreme than others.

At its warmest, when it is closest to the sun, Pluto can reach temperatures of minus degrees Fahrenheit minus degrees Celsius. At its coolest, temperatures can fall to minus degrees F minus C. Answer: Yes, the Sun - in fact, our whole solar system - orbits around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. But even at that high rate, it still takes us about million years to make one complete orbit around the Milky Way!

The moon orbits the Earth once every It also takes approximately 27 days for the moon to rotate once on its axis. As a result, the moon does not seem to be spinning but appears to observers from Earth to be keeping almost perfectly still. Scientists call this synchronous rotation. Venus is a terrestrial planet and is sometimes called Earth's " sister planet " because of their similar size, mass, proximity to the Sun, and bulk composition. It is radically different from Earth in other respects.

The reason outer space is so cold is because cold is what you get when there is no source of heat nearby. At our distance from the sun, if you put, say, a Mac Truck in space , the side facing the sun will quickly get hot enough to burn you.

The answer most people would give is Venus. But … it might actually be Mercury. Although Venus is the planet that comes closest to Earth as it sweeps by on its orbit, Mercury stays the closest to Earth the longest, according to a commentary published Tuesday March 12 in the magazine Physics Today. Because it is so close to the sun, it can be very hot. On its sunny side, Mercury can reach a scorching degrees Fahrenheit!