Mercury Updates

Historic planetary instability and catastrophe. Evidence for electrical scarring on planets and moons. Electrical events in today's solar system. Electric Earth.

Moderators: MGmirkin, bboyer

Locked
User avatar
FS3
Posts: 223
Joined: Sun Mar 16, 2008 8:44 pm
Location: Europe
Contact:

Mercury the Martian

Unread post by FS3 » Thu Mar 17, 2011 11:35 am

Pardon me, SJ - :? - but did I miss the clue here? Or was it meant to be some joke I didn't get?
StevenJay wrote:...But I also realize that our home planet is not only unique within this solr system, it also seems to be quite unique within our greater "neighborhood."

Image

To me, this suggests either a much greater age difference, or that Earth...
:shock:

Even if it says "MERCURY" on the picture -- this ought to be MARS instead...

The Moral: Don't swallow everything you get served.

FS3

User avatar
StevenJay
Posts: 506
Joined: Thu May 01, 2008 11:02 am
Location: Northern Arizona

Re: Mercury the Martian

Unread post by StevenJay » Thu Mar 17, 2011 12:09 pm

FS3 wrote:

Even if it says "MERCURY" on the picture -- this ought to be MARS instead...

The Moral: Don't swallow everything you get served.

FS3
Yeah, I realized I'd made a careless visual mistake soon after I posted it. By that time, it was too late to do anything about it, though, except feel the sting of embarrassment. :oops: :(
It's all about perception.

User avatar
sol88
Posts: 44
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 12:22 am
Location: The East Kimberley, Western Australia
Contact:

Re: Mercury magnetic field

Unread post by sol88 » Wed Mar 23, 2011 3:16 am

Was wondering today over the new http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2011/ ... senger.htm on the mysterious magnetic field and atmosphere of Mercury
Considering its estimated high density, Mercury is believed to be almost 75% iron surrounded by a thin shell of silicon-rich rock. Consensus theories about protoplanetary nebulae cannot explain the abundance of iron: the ratio of iron to silicon is opposite that of the other rocky planets.
Now iron is a fairly good conductor I take it and the Sun throws off a time varying magnetic field, would that not have some sort of transformer, "Egg of Columbus", coil type effect?

And would not the atmosphere be generated in situ via the interaction between the Solar wind and the crust of Mercury? like on the Moon and Comets? :o
“Black holes are where God divided by zero.” – Comedian Steven Wright

User avatar
StefanR
Posts: 1371
Joined: Sun Mar 16, 2008 8:31 pm
Location: Amsterdam

Re: Mercury Updates

Unread post by StefanR » Wed Mar 23, 2011 12:46 pm

sol88 wrote:Now iron is a fairly good conductor I take it and the Sun throws off a time varying magnetic field, would that not have some sort of transformer, "Egg of Columbus", coil type effect?
Some have had very odd ideas about that sol88.....
New scientific evidence suggests that deep inside Mercury, iron "snow" forms and falls toward the center of the planet, much like snowflakes form in Earth's atmosphere and fall to the ground.

The movement of this iron snow could be responsible for Mercury's mysterious magnetic field, say researchers from the University of Illinois and Case Western Reserve University. In a paper published in the April issue of Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists describe laboratory measurements and models that mimic conditions believed to exist within Mercury's core.

"Mercury's snowing core opens up new scenarios where convection may originate and generate global magnetic fields," said University of Illinois geology professor Jie (Jackie) Li. "Our findings have direct implications for understanding the nature and evolution of Mercury's core, and those of other planets and moons."
http://www.astronomy.com/en/sitecore/co ... field.aspx

Which was already brought up by NickC sometime ago:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum/phpB ... ?f=4&t=820
Last edited by nick c on Wed Mar 23, 2011 1:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: corrected link
The illusion from which we are seeking to extricate ourselves is not that constituted by the realm of space and time, but that which comes from failing to know that realm from the standpoint of a higher vision. -L.H.

flyingcloud
Posts: 490
Joined: Fri Nov 07, 2008 2:07 am
Location: Honey Brook

Re: Mercury Updates

Unread post by flyingcloud » Wed Mar 30, 2011 5:44 am


tholden
Posts: 934
Joined: Wed Jul 02, 2008 6:02 pm

People losing sleep over Mercury.....

Unread post by tholden » Sat May 14, 2011 2:36 pm

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/home/18103199.html

Discussion on the FR forum:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-blo ... 0050/posts
Two new computer simulations of long-term planetary motion — one by Jacques Laskar (Paris Observatory), the other by Konstantin Batygin and Gregory Laughlin (University of California, Santa Cruz) — have both reached the same disturbing conclusion.......

This flies in the face of the claim which Robert Bass made about the Titus/Bode law which describes the present planetary system as being a/the solution to a dynamical relaxation problem. Bass is one of America's better mathematicians and his findings have been used to argue against people claiming that our system could not have gone from a Velikovskian system to its present formation in less than some much larger space of time. Bass viewed this result as his opus magnus in life and had been very careful in working it out.

All of that is before you get to any sort of an idea about electricity having anything to do with orbits or stability of course...

flyingcloud
Posts: 490
Joined: Fri Nov 07, 2008 2:07 am
Location: Honey Brook

Re: Mercury Updates

Unread post by flyingcloud » Thu Jun 16, 2011 10:44 pm

really good stuff, just need that "small step/ giant leap"

Messenger orbital data confirm theories, reveal surprises

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-mes ... eveal.html

...
Among the fascinating features seen in flyby images of Mercury werebright, patchy deposits on some crater floors, but they remained a curiosity. New targeted MDIS observations reveal these patchy deposits to be clusters of rimless, irregular pitswith horizontal dimension from hundreds of meters to several kilometers. These pits are often surrounded by diffuse halos of higher-reflectance material, and they are found associated with central peaks, peak rings, and rims of craters.

"The etched appearanceof these landforms is unlike anything we've seen before on Mercury or the Moon," says Brett Denevi, a staff scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., and a member of the MESSENGER imaging team. "We are still debating their origin, but they appear to have a relatively young age and may suggest a more abundant than expected volatile component in Mercury's crust."
...


EDM in action
With Mercury's smaller magnetosphere and with the lack of a substantial atmosphere, the generation and distribution of energetic electrons differ from those at Earth. One candidate mechanism for their generation is the formation of a "double layer," a plasma structure with large electric fields along the local magnetic field.

seasmith
Posts: 2815
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2008 6:59 pm

Re: Mercury Updates

Unread post by seasmith » Sun Jun 19, 2011 2:42 pm

MERCURY UPDATE
(4 presentations)
Schematic illustration of the operation of MESSENGER's X-ray Spectrometer (XRS). When X-rays emitted from the Sun’s corona strike the planet, they can induce X-ray fluorescence from atoms at the surface. Detection of these fluorescent X-rays by the XRS allows determination of the surface chemical composition.
As a result of the north-south asymmetry in Mercury's internal magnetic field, the geometry of magnetic field lines is different in Mercury's north and south polar regions. In particular, the magnetic "polar cap" where field lines are open to the interplanetary medium is much larger near the south pole. This geometry implies that the south polar region is much more exposed than in the north to charged particles heated and accelerated by solar wind–magnetosphere interactions. The impact of those charged particles onto Mercury's surface contributes both to the generation of the planet's tenuous atmosphere and to the "space weathering" of surface materials, both of which should have a north-south asymmetry given the different magnetic field configurations at the two poles.

http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/news_room/p ... ulti9.html
The presence of events on the dayside, their lack in the southern hemisphere, and their frequency of occurrence at middle northern latitudes over all longitudes point to a more complex picture of magnetospheric activity than found at Earth.

User avatar
orrery
Posts: 383
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2010 12:04 pm
Location: USA

Re: Mercury the Martian

Unread post by orrery » Tue Jun 28, 2011 7:35 pm

StevenJay wrote:
FS3 wrote:

Even if it says "MERCURY" on the picture -- this ought to be MARS instead...

The Moral: Don't swallow everything you get served.

FS3
Yeah, I realized I'd made a careless visual mistake soon after I posted it. By that time, it was too late to do anything about it, though, except feel the sting of embarrassment. :oops: :(
Just change the picture source file.
"though free to think and to act - we are held together like the stars - in firmament with ties inseparable - these ties cannot be seen but we can feel them - each of us is only part of a whole" -tesla

http://www.reddit.com/r/plasmaCosmology

User avatar
StefanR
Posts: 1371
Joined: Sun Mar 16, 2008 8:31 pm
Location: Amsterdam

Exploring Mercury's Plasma Environment

Unread post by StefanR » Fri Jul 01, 2011 8:43 am

Exploring Mercury's Plasma Environment

The Sun is continually hurling its atmosphere into space, forming a solar wind that fills interplanetary space with charged particles or plasma. Now and then, there are major explosions in the solar atmosphere that release a large flux of plasma with speeds up to 3000 kilometers per second. As the closest planet to the Sun, Mercury has a ringside seat on these events.

Under normal conditions, solar wind does not reach Mercury’s surface. Mercury’s magnetic field, although weaker than that of Earth, generally deflects the charged particles around the planet. Because solar wind is supersonic, this boundary that Mercury’s magnetic field presents to the interplanetary medium is abrupt, marked by a sonic-boom-like phenomenon called a bow shock where solar wind particles are forced to go from supersonic to subsonic speeds as they are steered around Mercury. A numerical simulation of this process is shown in the top panel of Figure 1. Near Mercury’s poles, solar wind plasma has easier access to regions close to the planet and sometimes even reaches the surface (see the area near the north pole for this particular simulation). These high-latitude regions near Mercury are somewhat analogous to the auroral regions of Earth.

The violent release of solar coronal material, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), in the direction of Mercury changes Mercury's environment markedly. The simulations indicate that a CME can push Mercury's magnetic field toward the planet to a degree that allows solar plasmas direct access to a large portion of Mercury's surface, as shown in the bottom panel of Figure 1. The impact of charged particles on Mercury's surface, at high latitudes during normal solar wind conditions and over larger areas during CMEs and other energetic solar particle events, plays an important role in the generation of Mercury's exosphere and in the space weathering of Mercury's surface materials.

Image
The top panel in Figure 4 shows the FIPS measurements of protons (ionized hydrogen). Because FIPS is mounted behind MESSENGER’s sunshade that shields most instruments from heating by the Sun, some directions are blocked from observation. FIPS nonetheless has no difficulty detecting the hot plasmas and particles that come from near the planet. The hot plasmas coming from the volume of space between Mercury’s bow shock and the magnetopause, the outer boundary to Mercury’s magnetosphere, are readily visible as the multicolor bands in the top panel. Yet the top panel also indicates that there is a substantial plasma concentration near the planet in Mercury’s northern polar region, in broad agreement with model simulations such as that in Figure 1.

As shown by the second panel from the top in Figure 4, FIPS measurements of heavy ions indicate that these polar regions contain particularly high levels of ionized particles too heavy to have come from the Sun. These heavy ions (grouped in the figure by mass per charge (m*) near that for singly and doubly ionized helium and singly ionized oxygen and sodium) must be derived from the surface of the planet.

Image
One route for the formation of such a particle is illustrated schematically in Figure 5. When a charged particle or a micrometeoroid hits the surface of Mercury, a neutral particle can be knocked off the surface. This “sputtered” particle follows a ballistic trajectory around the planet until it is ionized by solar radiation or by collision with another particle. Now carrying a charge, the particle suddenly “feels” the draw of the electromagnetic forces surrounding the planet, and it is pulled up into space, where FIPS waits to sample it in orbit about the planet. Other source processes are also possible. For example, high-energy electrons can knock a charged particle loose from the surface, or volatile materials can be evaporated during heating of Mercury’s dayside surface.

It is noteworthy that heavy ions, derived from Mercury’s surface, are observed throughout the magnetosphere on all orbits (Figure 4, second panel from the top). This finding indicates that the ion generation process must be active essentially continuously.

As noted above, the processes that lead to heavy ions near Mercury are also those that contribute to Mercury’s neutral exosphere and to the “space weathering” of Mercury’s surface. As the MESSENGER mission progresses, we can look forward to exploring the many manifestations of these processes and how the observations from the spacecraft’s many instruments are strongly interlinked.
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/soc/highlights.html
The illusion from which we are seeking to extricate ourselves is not that constituted by the realm of space and time, but that which comes from failing to know that realm from the standpoint of a higher vision. -L.H.

seasmith
Posts: 2815
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2008 6:59 pm

Re: Mercury Updates

Unread post by seasmith » Fri Sep 30, 2011 2:55 pm

Image
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messe ... index.html
Images collected by MESSENGER have revealed an unexpected class of landform on Mercury and suggest that a previously unrecognized geological process is responsible for its formation. Images collected during the Mariner 10 and MESSENGER flybys of Mercury showed that the floors and central mountain peaks of some impact craters are very bright and have a blue color relative to other areas of Mercury. These deposits were considered to be unusual because no craters with similar characteristics are found on the Moon. But without higher-resolution images, the bright crater deposits remained a curiosity.
According to Head, the deposits appear typical of flood lavas, huge volumes of solidified molten rock similar to those found in the few-million-year-old Columbia River Basalt Group, which at one point covered 150,000 square kilometers (60,000 square miles) in the northwest United States. "Those on Mercury appear to have poured out from long, linear vents and covered the surrounding areas, flooding them to great depths and burying their source vents," Head says.


They also said that Mercury's magnetic field is only 3 deg offset from rotation axis and that
electrons don't swarm around it like Earth's, to create protective "Van Allen Belts".
"Analysis of the images and estimates of the rate at which the hollows may be growing led to the conclusion that they could be actively forming today," said David Blewett of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., lead author of one of the reports.

Scientists have also made new observations of the chemical composition of Mercury's surface, which is being used to test models of Mercury's formation and continue to study the relationship between the planet's tenuous atmosphere and surface makeup.

Among other findings, the study revealed a higher abundance of potassium than had previously been assumed.

"These measurements indicate Mercury has a chemical composition more similar to those of Venus, Earth, and Mars than expected," says APL's Patrick Peplowski, lead author of one of the papers.
http://uk.ibtimes.com/articles/222621/2 ... ecrets.htm

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... ?track=rss

seasmith
Posts: 2815
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2008 6:59 pm

Re: Mercury Updates

Unread post by seasmith » Wed Oct 26, 2011 2:32 pm

posted this yesterday and it disappeared ??

Image

Larger Image:
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/news_room/t ... 04B_lg.jpg
MESSENGER has indeed proven Mercury unexpectedly rich in sulfur. That in itself is a surprise that's forcing scientists to rethink how Mercury was formed. The prevailing models suggest that either (1) very early in Solar System history, during the final sweep-up of the large planetesimals that formed the planets, a colossal impact tore off much of Mercury's rocky outer layering; or (2) a hot phase of the early Sun heated up the surface enough to scorch off the outer layers. In either case, the elements with a low boiling point – volatiles like sulfur and potassium – would have been driven off.
But they're still there.
"The old models just don't fit with the new data, so we'll have to look at other hypotheses."
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/

larryduane100
Posts: 48
Joined: Sun May 25, 2008 11:22 am

Sleepy Hoolows of Mercury

Unread post by larryduane100 » Wed Oct 26, 2011 6:16 pm

I believe we have a clear case of electrical etching on Mercury showed by this YouTube but not admitted(or realized) by NASA.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqg8PR2mVvc

Larry White

larryduane100
Posts: 48
Joined: Sun May 25, 2008 11:22 am

Re: Sleepy Hollows of Mercury

Unread post by larryduane100 » Wed Oct 26, 2011 6:18 pm

Oops-it is Sleepy Hollows but I kinda like hoolows.
Larry

seasmith
Posts: 2815
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2008 6:59 pm

Re: Mercury Updates

Unread post by seasmith » Thu Dec 22, 2011 4:09 pm

Image

Ever since NASA's Mariner 10 spacecraft zipped past Mercury in 1974, scientists have wondered why the planet's magnetic field is so much wimpier than expected. Now, a new study led by researchers at Braunschweig University of Technology in Germany suggests that the solar wind—the incessant flow of charged particles boiling off the sun's surface—suppresses the field generated by the flow of molten iron in the planet's outer core. On the sunward side of Mercury, the magnetopause—the protective shield created by the planet's magnetic field—sits just 1200 kilometers above the planet's surface. That's so close, the team's computer models indicate, that magnetic fields created by particles flowing along the magnetopause reach deep into Mercury itself, counteracting the internally-generated field. Without the external fields generated by the solar wind, Mercury's magnetic field might be about 30 times stronger than it actually is, the researchers report today in Science. NASA's MESSENGER probe (artist's concept above) has been orbiting Mercury since mid-March and will provide unprecedented measurements of the strength and direction of the planet's magnetic field, revealing more about how such fields are generated in the first place.


http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2 ... 5dbaed19c1

Locked

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 12 guests