Mercury (planet)
Mercury is one of four terrestrial planets in the Solar System, and is a rocky body like Earth. It is the smallest planet in the Solar System, with an equatorial radius of . Mercury is also smaller—albeit more massive—than the largest natural satellites in the Solar System, Ganymede and Titan. Mercury consists of approximately 70% metallic and 30% silicate material. Mercury's density is the second highest in the Solar System at 5.427 g/cm, only slightly less than Earth's density of 5.515 g/cm. If the effect of gravitational compression were to be factored out from both planets, the materials of which Mercury is made would be denser than those of Earth, with an uncompressed density of 5.3 g/cm versus Earth's 4.4 g/cm.
John Johnson (astronomer)
In 2012, Johnson's team discovered three small rocky exoplanets in a red dwarf star system observed with the Kepler space telescope. The system was renamed Kepler-42 and the outermost planet was found to be nearly as small as Mars, making it the smallest known exoplanet at the time. A subsequent study used the host star's similarity to Barnard's Star and observations from the Keck Observatory to more precisely measure the properties of the system, including the sizes of the three planets.