The more we get to know about Mercury the weirder it seems – this is the headline at http://phys.org/print376910716.html … and it seems the planet closest to the Sun does not live up to expectations. It is a puzzle. NASAs MESSENGER space probe has revealed it is rich in elements one would have thought had been driven from the planet in its continued brushes with the solar wind – but no. They are still an important part of the planet's make up. Mercury is also thought to have had a violent birth – not elaborated upon. Sounds a bit like Velikovsky – but probably not.
Mercury is also very dark – and what else out there in space is very dark. Yes, comet nuclei. Its crust is mostly made up of sheets of lava – and craters dot some of the lava extrusions suggesting meteors or objects had collided with the planet at some stage. The article then says, the lava sheets 'must' cover Mercury's older crust – and this is another mystery as scientists have yet to work out what that original crust was made from. Graphite has been suggested – the kind of dark graphite you get in a pencil lead. MESSENGER did find graphite – but it was far from pure. It amounted to a small percentage of the rock debris. Back to the drawing board.
The piece then goes on to say there is evidence of recent (relatively) 'hollows' where the surface seems to have been eaten away by a process that caused solid volatiles such as sulphite, chlorine, sodium and potassium to vapourise. It all sounds a bit like an out gassing comet as seen on the Rosetta Mission last year – yet Mercury is a planet (or defined by mainstream as a planet). Mercury even has the shape of a comet – it could be argued, and let's not forget that Velikovsky proposed Venus might once have been a comet (or rather, had formerly behaved like a comet). Planets and comets – different kinds of orbits. Is that all?