NASA Discovers Mercury Dust Ring, Hints of Hidden Asteroids Near Venus

by Joel Hruska

Dust, in most contexts, isn’t very interesting. For astronomers, however, dust can be a veritable gold mine. Once viewed solely as a nuisance for its role in blocking our view of distant stellar objects, recent decades have demonstrated that dust plays a critical role in the long-term material cycling processes of the universe. It plays a role in the formation of stars and planets. Two new reports from NASA on discoveries in the inner system highlight dust-related discoveries concerning Mercury and Venus.

We’ll take Mercury first, given the planet’s location. A pair of researchers, Guillermo Stenborg and Russell Howard, wanted to search for evidence of a dust-free region theorized to exist near the Sun, where its temperature is hot enough to vaporize dust altogether. Using data sent back by NASA’s STEREO (Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory) satellite, they examined photographs shot by the satellite for evidence of dust around the sun. The ultimate goal was to understand what kind of environment NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will encounter on its seven-year journey towards our star and its mission to sample the low solar corona. (The Parker Space Probe is pretty cool.)

“We’re not really dust people,” said Howard, who is also the lead scientist for the…