Scientists have found the secret to help the Earth resist the huge energy from the Sun.
The sun is a giant sphere of energy, always emitting powerful bursts of energy. Those are solar storms, with speeds up to millions of kilometers per hour.
Science has confirmed that it is the sweeping solar storms that turn Mars into a dead planet, even though the planet had previously had oceans larger than the present Earth.
The reason Earth still exists today is thanks to a layer of magnetic field, like a shield that protects the atmosphere from being torn by solar storms.
And now, for the first time in history, NASA has observed and learned how this membrane is formed.
Membrane formation process.
According to NASA, this barrier is formed from a process called “magnetic reconnection” – a phenomenon that occurs when the magnetic field changes. It occurs in the chaotic region of the “magnetosphere”. And with this discovery, all of our understanding of how to protect this planet could be completely changed.
“We can create new hypotheses and models that make it easier to observe similar diaphragms on other planets.” – Dr. Jonathan Eastwood from Imperial College (UK) said.
According to NASA, the magnetic connection process has been observed quite a few times in the magnetosphere. However, it usually occurs only in relatively calm conditions, in an area less affected by the solar wind, so science pays little attention.
However, with four new observation spacecraft, NASA has found that this phenomenon occurs in an area close to the outer magnetosphere, called magnetosheath.
In this region, the atmosphere is extremely turbulent, and solar storms pass directly over it.
These 4 ships are part of the MMS (Magnetospheric Multiscale) project, which is tasked with investigating the phenomenon of magnetic connection, which is very common in the universe. What they discovered, however, was a new form of connection: Electron magnetic reconnection was completely different from what humans had known.
Previously, what happened in the magnetosheath region was a complete mystery to science, because the amount of plasma particles was so intense and chaotic. Now, the kind of connection they’ve found here is on a much smaller scale. Furthermore, instead of connecting by hydrogen ions, it uses electron flows.
“The turbulent region in the magnetosheath region contains a lot of magnetic energy,” said Tai Phan, PhD, from the University of California, Berkeley.
“This energy comes directly from the millions of kilometers per hour winds of the Sun. When it hits the magnetosheath region, violent waves of plasma will rush in.”
Previously, science could not explain how the Earth handled that amount of energy. But it seems the phenomenon of “electron reconnection” would be the answer.
The reason is that because of the smaller scale, this electron reconnection process will be much faster than usual. It allows our magnetic membrane to respond extremely quickly to the effects of the solar wind.
Besides, the study shows a rather large potential from the MMS project. It brings a lot of data that surprises science. And maybe in the future, there will be more “heavy” revelations, and the scientific community is waiting for that.