Professionals from space flight Center NASA opened the mystery of the dust of the atmosphere of mercury. Based on the data collected by the probe MESSENGER, who revealed the secrets of the 1 planets of the Solar system in the past 4 years, scientists have concluded that mercury steals gas from passing beside it of the comet Encke.

It turns out that cosmic symbiosis has quite the right to existence. The tail of comet Encke mercury bombards the flow of thousands of particles of dust allowing the first planet in the Solar system to create your own unique fine dust atmosphere. As a learned scientific workers, part of the tail of the comet during its close approach to the Sun is "off" and generates a "track" of dust, through which at times flies by mercury.

"We knew that the conflicts of the dust particles from space with the surface of the planets played a major role in shaping their accoster. But we could not know how great a role the dust particles from the comets played in their content in comparison with zodiac dust" - quoted by RIA Novosti rosemary Killen from space flight Center NASA Goddard in Greenbelt.

Was previously that mercury, like all planets of Solar system, regularly crosses the so-called zodiacal dust. It is a Grand accumulation of fragmented asteroids and particulate matter, stretched out in the form of a sort of "pancake" along the Ecliptic plane (the imaginary plane on which the Earth moves around the Sun). As did the scientists, the atmosphere of mercury absorbed a portion of the particles from the zodiacal cloud, when the planet was passing through its "pancake".
sections: Society, World News