Mercury is no different from a raisin fruit turning around the Sun.

Mercury is shrinking and "wrinkled" more like a raisin turning around the Sun. According to a report published last Sunday, the planet's diameter has shrunk to 14 km from nearly 4 billion years ago.

>>>Mercury shrinks faster than expected

Mercury shrinks itself because the planet's temperature is decreasing. The images captured by NASA spacecraft show that the rock surface covered with Mercury is shrinking, enveloping the planet with a surface full of jagged reefs and rocks.

"It's like a mountain belt of Mercury version," said Paul Byrne, a planetary geologist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC, the lead author of the study in Nature Geoscience. "It will be an impressive landscape."

The surface image of Mercury is captured by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft.(Source: nationalgeographic)

All planets are cold with certain temperature levels, and Mercury is no exception, although its location is closest to the Sun. But this hypothermia had an extraordinary impact on the already very rugged terrain of the planet, creating cliffs as high as 3 km and mountain ranges of up to 1,700 km along the planet's surface.

Investigating the surface of Mercury on the ground is completely impossible, because Mercury's surface temperature can be up to 430 degrees C. Instead, scientists used observations of the MESSENGER spacecraft. by NASA. MESSENGER started flying around Mercury since 2011.

"We see the landscape rushing into each other," said William McKinnon, a professor at the Planet and Earth Sciences department at Washington University. Louis said. McKinnon has also written an editorial about this issue, and thinks that the earthquakes that happened continuously created this landscape on Mercury. "If we can put seismic gauges on Mercury without being burned by the Sun, maybe we can hear the rocks hitting each other."

The data collected this time made scientists think. The data obtained from the Mariner 10, flying around Mercury three times in the years 1974-1975, indicate that the diameter of this planet only shrinks about 2 to 6 km compared to 4 million years ago. However, assumptions based on Mercury's core structure predict that the number must be 10 times greater.

The rocks and cliffs on Mercury have many similarities with Mars and the Moon. However, Mercury's shrinkage rate is much larger than other planets.

With new discoveries about this solar system's smallest planet, scientists can continue to ask and solve new questions: why Mercury has reduced its size so strongly, the process of shrinking captures beginning when and how it happened.