{"id":24887,"date":"2022-05-03T04:56:56","date_gmt":"2022-05-03T04:56:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/?p=24887"},"modified":"2022-05-03T04:56:56","modified_gmt":"2022-05-03T04:56:56","slug":"mercurys-sodium-tail-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/?p=24887","title":{"rendered":"Mercurys Sodium Tail"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><img src='https:\/\/apod.nasa.gov\/image\/2205\/MercuryTailPleiades_Voltmer_960_annotated.jpg' style='max-width:600px;' \/><\/p>\n<div>That&#8217;s no comet. Below the Pleiades star cluster is actually a planet: Mercury. Long exposures of our Solar System&#8217;s innermost planet may reveal something unexpected: a tail. Mercury&#8217;s thin atmosphere contains small amounts of sodium that glow when excited by light from the Sun. Sunlight also liberates these molecules from Mercury&#8217;s surface and pushes them away. The yellow glow from sodium, in particular, is relatively bright. Pictured, Mercury and its sodium tail are visible in a deep image taken last week from La Palma, Spain through a filter that primarily transmits yellow light emitted by sodium. First predicted in the 1980s, Mercury&#8217;s tail was first discovered in 2001. Many tail details were revealed in multiple observations by NASA&#8217;s robotic MESSENGER spacecraft that orbited Mercury between 2011 and 2015. Tails, of course, are usually associated with comets. via NASA <a href=\"https:\/\/apod.nasa.gov\/apod\/ap220503.html\"><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That&#8217;s no comet. Below the Pleiades star cluster is actually a planet: Mercury. Long exposures of our Solar System&#8217;s innermost planet may reveal something unexpected: a tail. Mercury&#8217;s thin atmosphere <a href=\"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/?p=24887\" class=\"more-link\">[&hellip;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"Layout":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[10,12],"class_list":["entry","author-admin","post-24887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-whatsup","tag-ifttt","tag-nasa"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24887"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24888,"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24887\/revisions\/24888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/finn-family.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}