Mercury's Tiny Angry Pits
Category: Outer Space 13th May 2026
Listen, you look at Mercury and expect it to be this battered old tin can, right? Close to the Sun, all roasted and sensible. But then NASA sent MESSENGER round and found these weird shiny little dents everywhere. They call 'em "hollows." Tiny, shallow, bright hollows. Irregular edges, no raised rims, like someone pinched bits out and left the paint cleaner around the hole. Proper odd.
The kicker is they don't look like impact craters. They look fresh, like they've only just been made. And that's daft for a rock world that's been lying about for four and a half billion years. Because whoever nicked bits off Mercury wasn't other rocks. It's the surface itself going: "Nah, I'm done, I'm out."
Scientists reckon hollows form when volatile materials - things that can vaporise - get yanked out by the Sun and by space weathering. Mercury was supposed to be poor in volatiles, but the hollows say otherwise. Bits like sulfur or sodium or other sneaky elements maybe evaporate under intense sunlight or after being blasted by micrometeorites, and the ground collapses into these little hollows. Like a loaf that sinks where someone nicked the raisins out. Very unsporting.
They glow, too. Not glow like glow-in-the-dark, but they're brighter than the surroundings, which suggests they're young and haven't been browned by solar wind. You can even find hollows inside impact craters and along escarpments. It's like the planet keeps making these tiny pouts in all sorts of unlikely corners. Proper sulky.
I like to think of Mercury as that one bloke on the bus who looks tiny and quiet but then suddenly starts peeling the seats because he's bored. No big drama, just a load of tiny, inexplicable vandalism. Either way, it tells us Mercury's not the dead, boring lump we thought. It's alive in the most miserable, passive-aggressive way possible. Made me look at the sky a bit longer and think: the Sun's not just a heater, it's a bloke with a torch and a temper.