MERCURY’S puny magnetic field may be so weak thanks to constant wrangles with the solar wind.
NASA’s Mariner 10 mission detected a magnetic field around our solar system’s innermost planet in 1974, but its cause remained a mystery – until recent measurements suggested that Mercury’s core may be partly molten. As with Earth, these “moving parts” could act like a dynamo, generating electricity and consequently a magnetic field. But that cannot explain why Mercury’s field is so weak, says Karl-Heinz Glassmeier at the Institute for Geophysics and Extraterrestrial Physics at Braunschweig, Germany.
The answer may lie at the magnetopause – the…
