Talk:Mercury's magnetic field

A fact from Mercury's magnetic field appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 27 July 2011 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that data from Mariner 10 (pictured) led to the discovery of Mercury's magnetic field in 1974?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2011/July.

Wikipedia

A magnetic field with a north and south pole?[edit]

To me, the lead sentence sounds as if a magnetic field with both a north and a south pole were something special, which is wrong. I admit that the phrasing of the source isn't better, but I think they mean the field has only two poles. Could that be clarified? --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 20:24, 23 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Done - I just changed "meaning north and south poles are present" to "meaning the field has only two magnetic poles", but if it's still wrong to you, clarify it. SpaceChimp1992 (talk) 00:51, 24 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think it looks fine (but I'm not an expert on this subject). Thanks, ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 07:07, 24 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Pseudoscience and the Dipole Moment[edit]

"Since its discovery in 1974 by Mariner 10, Mercury's magnetic dipole moment has decayed. Dr. Robert Humphreys had predicted that in 2011, the magnetic moment should be between 4.5 and 4.6 x 1019 joules per tesla (ampere-square meters);[15] but instead, when measured, the magnetic moment had declined from 4.8 to just over 3.8 x 1019 joules per tesla. Such a rapid decline would account for nearly 30 percent of the magnetic moment."

The above quote from the wiki article attributes its source to Dr. Robert Humphreys's blog (http://creation.com/magnetic-message-from-mercury) on a website, not a peer-reviewed journal. Magnetospheres are outside Humphreys's area of expertise. Furthermore, Humphreys's assertions are directly contradicted by experts in the field, such as J.E.P. Connerney of Goddard Space Flight Center and N. F. Ness of the University of Delaware, who noted in "Mercury's Magnetic Field and Interior" ( http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/onlinebks/Mercury/MercuryCh15.pdf ), chapter 15 from the book Mercury, edited by Faith Vilas, Clark R. Chapman, and Mildred Shapley Matthews, 1989, about the original Mariner data: "Estimates of the dipole obtained from bow shock and/or magnetopause positions (only) range from approximately 200 nT-Rm³ (Russell 1977) to approximately 400 nT-Rm³ (Slavin and Holzer 1979b)." They "demonstrate that the lack of agreement among models is due to fundamental limitations imposed by the spatial distribution of available observations." Thus the scientific community has been unable to constrain the Mariner-derived dipole moment within a factor of 2, and yet Humphreys is somehow able to detect a decline of 30% between that and the Messenger data? Not possible. This pseudoscientific claptrap should be removed from the article. Barak Thunder (talk) 19:38, 23 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified[edit]

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Title[edit]

Is there a reason why this isn't Magnetosphere of Mercury, which would follow Magnetosphere of Jupiter and Magnetosphere of Saturn? Double sharp (talk) 07:16, 7 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I get it from reading the article, which covers the internal part of the field as well as the external part (the magnetosphere only covers the latter). Double sharp (talk) 07:17, 7 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified (January 2018)[edit]

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