'Class Notes Of A Ravenclaw- Year One ' - Hogwarts Library

Class Notes Of A Ravenclaw- Year One

A guide of class notes for every class in Year One, for every week- Includes Astronomy, Charms, D.A.D.A, Herbology, History of Magic, Potions and Transfigurations

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05/31/21

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Astronomy- Week Two

Chapter 2

Lesson Two:

Mercury

Etymology: Mercury was named after the Roman god of thievery, commerce and travel (Greek: Hermes).

Mercury is the first planet from the sun, and it shows up in both the morning and night, sunrise and sunset, dawn and dusk. Mercury is a rocky planet with lots of craters, covered in boulders and "pulverized" dust. Temperatures range from 90 Kelvin to 700 Kelvin, but is geologically dead. In 1974, Mariner 10 (a muggle probe) approached the planet from 10,000 kilometres from the surface of the lane, sending back thousands of images. 35 years later, in 2008, the Messenger mission sent back even clearer and higher resolution images depicting Mercury to look a lot like the Moon, with no signs of clouds, rivers, dust storms, or other aspects of weather. Mercury's magnetic field, is about 1/100^th that of Earth’s, but the field is strong enough to deflect the solar wind and create a small magnetosphere around the small planet. Like that of Earth, the field was probably generated inside Mercury's core. Its interior must be dominated by a large, heavy, iron-rich core with a radius of around 1800 Kilometres. A lunar-like mantle lies above this core, to a depth of only around 500-600 kilometers. This means that only around 40% of the volume of Mercury (60% of its mass) is contained inside its iron core. The ratio of core volume to total planet volume is greater for Mercury than for any other object in the Solar system.

In the mid-19^th century, an Italian astronomer named Giovanni Schiaparelli used a telescope to discern surface features on Mercury. He fathered the belief that Mercury rotates synchronously with its revolution about the Sun (i.e. once every 88 Earth days) which persisted for almost half a century. Finally, in in 1965, Muggle Astronomers in Puerto Rico found that the rotation period of Mercury is not 88 days, as had previously been thought, but only 59 days, exactly two-thirds of the planet’s orbital period. This means that the planet rotates three times when it has completed two orbits around the Sun.