Friday, September 30, 2011

Mysterious Mercury

The other papers in the Science package reveal other intriguing details about Mercury: it has a magnetic field like Earth, but it's a weak one, and the magnetic pole is tilted about three degrees from the actual, geographical pole; it has a population of charged particles swirling about it like Earth does, but the magnetic field is not powerful enough to organize them into anything like Earth's Van Allen belts; plains in the planet's northern hemisphere have now been confirmed to have been formed by volcanism, meaning Mercury was geologically more active than once believed.