Mention the word “mercury” and one of two things comes to mind: the silvery metal that is liquid at normal temperatures, or ...

Mercury has the shortest and fastest orbit around the Sun and experiences dramatic temperature changes as it rotates. It is a world of extremes. Explore facts about our solar system's fastest planet.

The BepiColombo spacecraft will start orbiting Mercury in 2026. Right now, it's conducting a series of flybys of the planet to get into position for that orbit. On Jan. 8, one of those flybys ...

This is already the sixth mission of the BepiColombo probe in Mercury's orbit. This time, it approached the most minor planet in the Solar System to a distance of just 295 kilometres. Closer looks ...

Orbiting so close to the Sun that it takes just 88 days to complete an orbit, Mercury is an elusive planet—and, yet, there it was. Not 10 minutes later it had sunk below the horizon, which ...

Dwarf planet Pluto, on the other hand, has a fairly squashed orbit. Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, has the most eccentric orbit, with the difference between the distance at perihelion and ...

When someone mentions a “doubleheader,” we usually think of two baseball games played back-to-back by the same pair of teams. To railroad employees, the word refers to a train pulled by two ...

Plus, the planets' paths don't lie precisely on the same plane. Compared with Mercury (whose orbit, within our planetary family, is the most egg-shaped and tilted), the paths of the four outer ...

Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are frequently seen in the night sky; but because Venus and Mercury orbit closer to the sun than Earth, with smaller, faster orbits, it's rare for them to make an ...

Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are frequently seen in the night sky; but because Venus and Mercury orbit closer to the sun than Earth, with smaller, faster orbits, it's rare for them to make an ...