Question about Mercury Solar Day

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longhorn_tish
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Question about Mercury Solar Day

Post by longhorn_tish » Sat Oct 08, 2011 2:33 pm

I have a question about the length of the Mercury Solar Day. I homeschool my children and we have been studying Mercury for the last 4 weeks. Every book we checked out from the library and even our astronomy textbook taught us that a day on Mercury was 59 earth days and a year was 88 earth days. Yet, the APOD article about Mercury today and its references all say 176 earth days. Have astronomers changed the number in recent years? The books we checked out and our Astronomy text was published in 2004 and all the other books were all published in the late 90's and early 2000's.

Thanks for helping us understand this.

Tish

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Chris Peterson
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Re: Question about Mercury Solar Day

Post by Chris Peterson » Sat Oct 08, 2011 2:56 pm

longhorn_tish wrote:I have a question about the length of the Mercury Solar Day...
http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php? ... 54#p159753
Chris

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