Scientists see the very first ‘space hurricane’ whirls over the North Pole

Scientists suspect that conditions in space could create stormy conditions above the earth for some time, but there is now photographic evidence of what researchers call a plasma hurricane.

The authors of a new paper published this week called Nature Communications says they have the first observations of a swirling mass of plasma above the North Pole resembling a hurricane.

Using satellite images in 2014, the teams at the University of Reading and Shandong University were able to create a 3D image of the 1000 km wide mass that allows electrons to rain instead of water. The space storms above the earth are created when solar winds from the sun rise into the atmosphere of the earth.

“Tropical storms are associated with large amounts of energy, and these hurricanes in space must be created by extremely large and fast transmissions of solar energy and charged particles into the Earth’s upper atmosphere,” said Professor Mike Lockwood, a space scientist at the University of Reading. said in a news release.

Advertisement

A 3D image of our sister station of what a space hurricane looks like (WKMG 2021)

Lockwood and his team believe that these hurricanes can also occur outside our solar system.

“Plasma and magnetic fields in the atmosphere of planets exist throughout the universe, so the findings suggest that hurricanes in space must be a widespread phenomenon,” Lockwood said.

What makes this new discovery so special is that hurricanes have also been observed in the lower atmospheres of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, but the existence of hurricanes in the upper atmospheres of planets has not been detected before.

Hurricanes occur in the Earth’s oceans over hot water. When hot, humid air rises and creates a low pressure area near the surface that sucks in the surrounding air, causing extremely strong winds and creating clouds leading to the hurricane conditions we are used to.

But in the upper atmosphere, solar winds are responsible for creating spatial hurricanes.

The solar wind is a stream of charged particles that come from the atmosphere of the corona or sun. The particles move in all directions and vary with everything they encounter, even the earth. Fortunately, our planet has a shield, the magnetosphere. If it were not for this magnetic field, the earth would be in great trouble. Instead, most of the solar wind is safely deflected away and its journey through space continues. If there were no magnetic field, harmful radiation from the solar wind would bring it to the surface and threaten life.

Advertisement

Some particles that do not bend in space are directed to the north and south poles. Those particles then exchange with gases in our atmosphere, causing the gases to move in a higher energy state and produce vivid light screens, or the Auroras, also known as the northern or southern light.

Graph of our sister station depicting how solar wind interacts with the earth (WKMG 2021)

The auroral oval is the footprint in the atmosphere of the boundary between the strongly stretched field lines of the polar cap and the more normal field lines at lower latitudes. When the solar wind is strong, this boundary moves closer to the equator.

The auroral oval usually clings near the poles, but space hurricanes occur even closer to the pole.

Copyright 2021 by WSLS 10 – All rights reserved.

.Source