Given that the weather on our own planet is always such a huge topic of conversation (unusually hot and sunny in London this week, by the way), I can see that the weather might be intrinsically interesting even on other planets. All the more reason then, perhaps, to just play the news straight. So why do so many stories about space weather get jazzed up with newly-invented words or over-stretched metaphors?

Last night we had news of ‘iron snow’ on Mercury. Cool. Iron snow, really? We’ve had methane rain (on Titan), so I read on excitedly to hear about this devastating weather phenomenon, imagining lumps of metal whacking into the ground, or flakes of it gliding softly to a rusty blanket of iron. But no. This snow is apparently inside the planet’s core. Come on. You can’t have snow INSIDE a planet. That’s just silly. (But still kind of cool, so here are some links to the story: Discovery; Innovations)

We’ve also seen ‘smust’ on Titan (Nature), and, back on Earth this week, ‘vog’ in Hawaii (AP).