Inside Mercury?s orbit

Regular readers may know me as the beloved online blogger for Discover Magazine, but I also sometimes write longer articles for the print version as well.

Last summer, I wrote a piece on the search for small solar system objects that might, theoretically, circle the Sun inside Mercury’s orbit. Called vulcanoids, they are extremely difficult to observe, which is why it’s still not certain if they exist or not (I wrote a brief post about this back in 2008). Two astronomers (and friends of mine), Dan Durda and Alan Stern, are hot on the trail of the purported possible planetesimals; I talked to them about their chase and the history of the search for these hot little objects.

Until now, the article was only available in the print magazine or to online subscribers, but now my brilliant prose is open to the public. Seriously, this is a pretty cool topic, and one that most people don’t know about. The region between the Sun and Mercury is closer to the Earth than the main asteroid belt, yet we know much less about it. Read the article and find out why.

Full story at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BadAstronomyBlog/~3/-3jpFSk0oPM/