Comment on the rather vituperative mood of the forum of late. You're all going to think I'm nuts, but this is something which has played out so many times that even my most skeptical friends now believe. The planet Mercury rules communication, electronics, computers, accidents. Four times a year it goes retrograde for about 3 weeks. That means that from Earth it appears to be moving backward in the sky (has to do with our different orbit). When that happens, tempers flare, communication mishaps tend to happen, computers break down, travel plans go awry...everything seems to take more effort. I have a tendency to either burn/cut myself - this time I had a houseguest with parrots who generally like me a lot, but this trip one of them bit me rather badly. Mercury goes direct, meaning relative to earth it starts appearing to move forward again, on August 26. I suspect things will begin to return to normal at that point - sometimes it can take as long as it takes for Mercury to return to the same point at which it began going backwards before the effects really disappear. Feel free to dismiss as bullshit - but at the same time, keep track of when it is retrograde and the number of problems in those areas crop up when it does.
Christ this is why Americans are falling behind in science. What else can either of you tell us about Mercury without looking it up? What is its size relative to the other planets in our solar system? Does it have any moons? Was Mercury a Greek or Roman god?
Mercury is the closest to the sun, and other than the dwarf planets, like Pluto and Eris, is the smallest planet in the solar system. I *believe* if I remember correctly, that its year may be longer than its day. It has no moons. Because of its proximity to the sun, we know relatively less about it than other planets. Mercury was Roman, and the Greek equivalent is Hermes. They were both considered messengers of the gods. I find astronomy fascinating, though I tend to be more geeky about galaxies and cosmology in general. Mythology is something I was raised studying, since I grew up in a polytheistic household. I'm a geek.
I think Mercury is the smallest. I like cosmology also. I heard or read somewhere (I don't remember) that the stars we see in the sky at night could be long dead but, we are just now seeing the light they put out when they were burning. It took the light that long to get here, before we could see it. I think that's amazing and, it shows you how vast the universe is.
I looked it up later, and I was right, it has 3 years to every 2 days. I was right about it being the smallest, unless you still think of Pluto as a planet rather than a dwarf planet. Fascinating news this week on the subject of cosmology - they found a planet made of diamond, and they observed a star being eaten by a black hole. The idea that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each is mind boggling. The light from our closest neighbor star takes 4 years to travel here. Those which are trillions of miles away, we may be observing their light from before our own sun was born, 5 billion years ago.
Yeah, I'm remember someone telling me that we used to think that it was just our galaxy (the milky way) and, our neighbor, the andromeda galaxy. They then discovered that there were billions of galaxies out there. I agree, it is mind-boggling.
