(25.01.2018)

“Mercury is the perfect test object for these experiments because it is so sensitive to the gravitational effect and activity of the Sun,” explained Antonio Genova, the lead author of the study and a MIT researcher working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Researchers were able to make these calculations from the data gathered by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft which made three ‘flybys’ of Mercury in 2008 and 2009 and orbited Mercury between March 2011 and April 2015 before it crashed into Mercury in 2015, Mail noted.