The
yellow color shows the standing bow shock in front of Mercury. The
signature of material flowing in a vastly different direction than the
solar wind -- an HFA – can be seen in red at the lower left. Image Credit: NASA/Duberstein.
The
solar wind of particles streaming off the sun helps drive flows and
swirls in space as complicated as any terrestrial weather pattern.
Scientists have now spotted at planet Mercury, for the first time, a
classic space weather event called a hot flow anomaly, or HFA, which has
previously been spotted at Earth, Venus, Saturn and Mars.
"Planets have a bow shock the same way a supersonic jet does," said
Vadim Uritsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,
Maryland. "These hot flow anomalies are made of very hot solar wind
deflected off the bow shock."
The results were published in the Journal of Geophysical Research:
Space Physics on Jan. 15, 2014. To identify the presence of HFAs at
Mercury, the team used observations from NASA's Messenger
(short for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and
Ranging) to detect the presence of two HFA signatures. The first
measurement was of magnetic fields that can be used to detect giant
electric current sheets that lead to HFAs. The second was of the heating
of the charged particles. The scientists then analyzed this information
to quantify what kind of turbulence exists in the region, which
provided the final smoking gun of an HFA.
Not only is this the first sighting of HFAs at Mercury, but the
observations help round out a picture of this type of space weather in
general. HFAs come in a variety of scale sizes – from around 600 miles
across at Venus to closer to 60,000 miles across at Saturn. This study
suggests that the most important factor for determining HFA size is the
geometry and size of the planet's bow shock.
Related Link
