Solved cryptogram
A day on Mercury lasts longer than its year, because the planet turns slower than it orbits.
Astronomy Facts, sourced to NASA.
What it means
Mercury circles the sun in about eighty eight Earth days, and one full cycle of sunrise to sunrise there takes roughly a hundred and seventy six. Stand on the surface and you would wait through two of Mercury's years before the sun came up again. The planet is locked into a rhythm where it turns exactly three times for every two orbits, which is a stable arrangement rather than a coincidence.
The claim comes from NASA, and the page it comes from was read on 2026-08-27 to confirm it still says this.
This is not the kind of claim that goes out of date, which is why it was set as a puzzle rather than a fact with a shelf life.
Solve it yourself
This fact is a cryptogram here: 74 letters over 19 different ones, graded hard.
- SourceNASA
- CollectionAstronomy Facts
- Difficultyhard
- Length74 letters, 19 of them different
Nearby in the collection
The facts either side of this one.
- Royal Society of Chemistryhard, 72 letters
- NASAmedium, 75 letters
- NASAmedium, 76 letters
- NASAmedium, 75 letters
About as hard as this one
Scored closest to it by the model behind our guide to solving cryptograms.