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Discovery of Sodium in the Atmosphere of Mercury

Potter, Andrew, Morgan, Thomas·1985·Science

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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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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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Discovery of Sodium in the Atmosphere of Mercury. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1126/science.229.4714.651
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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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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.