NEW YORK, BRONX (ORDO News) — Something amazing happens around planets with their magnetospheres, and Mercury, which appears barren and lonely, is no exception. Scientists from France and Japan, led by astronomer Mitsunori Ozaki from the University of Canada, discovered whistling waves around this planet. A study on a related topic was published in Nature Astronomy.
This discovery surprised astronomers, since Mercury has a rather modest magnetic field compared to other planets and has virtually no atmosphere. The planet is so close to the Sun that it is constantly exposed to sunlight and radiation. But this “tormented” world is fraught with mysterious secrets.
Studies of Mercury have been sparse and unsystematic until recently, leading to the current understanding of its atmosphere in the extremely low environment. However, the joint Mercury BepiColombo mission, launched in 2018, aims to study Mercury’s magnetosphere.
An important element of this mission is the MIO instrument, designed to analyze Mercury’s magnetosphere in more detail. Despite the difficulty of entering orbit, the spacecraft conducted flybys of Mercury in 2021 and 2022, during which they obtained data on the planet’s magnetic field.
And in these data, the researchers found clear evidence of wave glow in Mercury’s magnetosphere. However, the waves appear only in a limited part of Mercury’s magnetosphere, spreading as part of the dawn.
This implies the assumption that there is some kind of physical mechanism that stimulates these waves in this particular group, or suppresses them in others. The researchers conducted simulations that showed that the transfer of energy from electrons to electromagnetic waves is more efficient in a constant dawn, resulting in the generation of whooshing waves.
Understanding and characterizing these mysterious trends requires additional research and analysis.
“The present study sheds light on the magnetic planet and its interaction with the solar wind, which may provide insight into not only Mercury, but also other worlds in the solar system and even exoplanets,” the researchers report.
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