Polar ice on Mercury

[james_davis_nicoll]

Mercury's north pole has frozen water according to data revealed Thursday by NASA scientists, confirming the long-held suspicion that the very hot planet closest to the Sun has ice lurking in the shade.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

"The Coldest Place" dates from 1964, which means the writing of it but not the publication of it predates the discovery that Mercury is not locked into a 1:1 resonance. It would have been roughly simultaneous with the discovery of the CMB.

You know, it wouldn't have been impossible given when Known Space was being put together for it have had Steady State locked in as a core assumption. See, for example, Pohl and Williamson's 1964 novel The Reefs of Space. After the mid-1960s, you pretty much had to be someone like Hoyle or Hogan to go with Steady State.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Or, sigh, Ken MacLeod. (http://kenmacleod.blogspot.ca/2005/10/big-bag-never-opened-some-time-in.html)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

How did I know before reading that he was going to touch on The Big Bang Never Happened and on New Scientist?

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

For a thorough (if somewhat dated) scientific demolition of tBBNH, see http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/lerner_errors.html

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I appreciate your link. Thanks.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Well, even if you ignore the CMB radiation, the energy received by us from starlight would lead to an equilibrium temperature of about 3K(*). This was pointed out by Eddington in 1926.

(*) This is because we're in a galaxy, and so get a lot more starlight than a randomly chosen point in the universe.

Also, if the Earth were a blackbody and received no external energy input, its surface would still have a temperature of 33 K just due to the need to radiate the flow of internal heat. For a body like Mercury this temperature is probably not too much lower, since the rate of radiation from a blackbody goes as the fourth power of absolute temperature.