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Space

Weird dust ring orbits the sun alongside Mercury and we don't know why

Very little debris should be able to survive for long in the area near Mercury, but the innermost planet seems to orbit the sun alongside a ring of dust that researchers can’t explain

By Leah Crane

8 February 2023

Several dust rings are illustrated circling the Sun. In line with these rings' position around the Sun are the planets Mercury, Venus, and Earth.

Earth, Venus and Mercury all share their orbits around the sun with vast clouds of dust

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith

Mercury appears to share its orbit with a huge ring of dust millions of kilometres thick, and scientists aren’t sure how it got there. None of the mechanisms researchers could think of to explain it create enough dust, and the region of space it passes through is so close to the sun that we would expect any dust there to be pulled in by the sun’s gravity almost immediately.

The dust ring was …

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