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Discovery of Sodium in the Atmosphere of Mercury
Abstract
The spectrum of Mercury at the Fraunhofer sodium D lines shows strong emission features that are attributed to resonant scattering of sunlight from sodium vapor in the atmosphere of the planet. The total column abundance of sodium was estimated to be 8.1 × 10 11 atoms per square centimeter, which corresponds to a surface density at the subsolar point of about 1.5 × 10 5 atoms per cubic centimeter. The most abundant atmospheric species found by the Mariner 10 mission to Mercury was helium, with a surface density of 4.5 × 10 3 atoms per cubic centimeter. It now appears that sodium vapor is a major constituent of Mercury's atmosphere.
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Citations
Cited by
Understanding the Lunar Surface and Space-Moon Interactions
Lucey, P. (2006) · Reviews in Mineralogy and Geochemistry · doi:10.2138/rmg.2006.60.2 · Cited by 434
The lunar atmosphere: History, status, current problems and context
Stern, S. A. (1999) · Reviews of Geophysics · doi:10.1029/1999rg900005 · Cited by 405
Metadata
- Authors
- Potter, A., & Morgan, T.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 1985-08-16
- Volume
- 229
- Issue
- 4714
- Pages
- 651-653
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W2078257974
- Cited by
- 312
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 14.16
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Potter, A., & Morgan, T. (1985). Discovery of Sodium in the Atmosphere of Mercury. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.229.4714.651
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.