You may not know this, however Earth’s magnetic field He has a tail. like the sun‘s Solar wind When it hits the planet, it leaves behind a kind of long shadow that tracks over our planet. Scientists appropriately call this magnetotail. The magnetotail is usually full of magnetic storms.
But over the past several years, scientists have learned of a secret surrounding the magnetotail: a missing storm. They found the distinct sign of a storm, but there was no actual storm to accompany it. NASA‘s Multiscale magnetosphere (MMS) The task is now in the case.
MMS consists of four Satellites They were all launched on the same Atlas V rocket in 2015. Since then, the quartet have been studying Earth’s magnetopause: the boundaries of the region dominated by the planet’s magnetic field. The magnetic separator is constantly ignited by magnetic reconnections, which refers to when the lines that make up the magnetic field come together, then separate, then combine again, creating fantastic waves of heat and kinetic energy. (These reconnections, if they occur Earth’s atmosphereIt may cause twilight.)
Related: 4 NASA satellites to search for energy eruptions in the Earth’s magnetic field
Scientists call these episodes substorms. In 2017, MMS observed the magnetic reconnection of a substorm, but there was no actual substorm accompanying it. The substorm is supposed to come with violent electrical currents and magnetic field fluctuations, but MMS has detected traces of either.
“We did not look at the movement of magnetic field lines on a global scale, so it is possible that this unusual substorm was a very local event observed by the MMS,” said Andy Marshall, a postdoctoral researcher at the Southwest Research Institute. in a permit. “If not, it may reshape our understanding of the relationship between tail-side reconnection and substorms.”
So, next year, MMS will measure magnetic reconnections LandThe real magnetic field, while scientists on Earth conduct simulations of the magnetic field to understand how it behaves. By comparing the two, scientists hope they can solve the puzzle by better understanding the precise relationship between reconnection and the events that cause it.
“It is possible that there are significant differences between the global convection patterns of substorms and non-substorm tail reconnection,” Marshall said.
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