Tiny sun-baked Mercury may be more like mother Earth than anyone could have imagined — at least in terms of having had a very long-lived global magnetic field. NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft which only last week did a controlled crash into our solar system’s innermost orb, detected and characterized weak ancient remanents of the field in magnetized surface rocks.
In a paper published online in the journal Science, a team of planetary scientists and geophysicists report that, in fact, Mercury qualifies as having the longest-lived global magnetic field of any planet in our inner solar system. During its last low-flying days, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft found extremely weak signatures of this original field which may date back some four billion years. The team then compared and contrasted with the planet’s existing magnetic field which, like Earth’s, is generated by a dynamo in a liquid outer core of molten iron. However, diminutive Mercury only ranks a little more than a third the size of our own planet. - Source
NASA's MESSENGER Spots Mercury's Ancient Magnetic Field
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