Posted on 12/16/2008 2:11:19 PM PST by TaraP
Dec. 16, 2008: NASA's five THEMIS spacecraft have discovered a breach in Earth's magnetic field ten times larger than anything previously thought to exist. Solar wind can flow in through the opening to "load up" the magnetosphere for powerful geomagnetic storms. But the breach itself is not the biggest surprise. Researchers are even more amazed at the strange and unexpected way it forms, overturning long-held ideas of space physics.
"At first I didn't believe it," says THEMIS project scientist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "This finding fundamentally alters our understanding of the solar wind-magnetosphere interaction."
The opening was hugefour times wider than Earth itself," says Wenhui Li, a space physicist at the University of New Hampshire who has been analyzing the data. Li's colleague Jimmy Raeder, also of New Hampshire, says "1027 particles per second were flowing into the magnetospherethat's a 1 followed by 27 zeros. This kind of influx is an order of magnitude greater than what we thought was possible."
The event began with little warning when a gentle gust of solar wind delivered a bundle of magnetic fields from the Sun to Earth. Like an octopus wrapping its tentacles around a big clam, solar magnetic fields draped themselves around the magnetosphere and cracked it open. The cracking was accomplished by means of a process called "magnetic reconnection." High above Earth's poles, solar and terrestrial magnetic fields linked up (reconnected) to form conduits for solar wind. Conduits over the Arctic and Antarctic quickly expanded; within minutes they overlapped over Earth's equator to create the biggest magnetic breach ever recorded by Earth-orbiting spacecraft.
I thought that was a foregone conclusion. It’s the when that gets interesting.
Gamma ray blast...
I think a typesetter lost a ^ or the superscript 27 fell down due to font...or it’s magnetic field was also breached so succumbed to gravity...
you are so smrt.
This happened on June 3, 2007? I wonder if they just noticed this anomaly, or what?
Longer article here.
They noticed it shortly after millions of morons blindly voted the destroy their country.
It's written as 1027 in the original article.
I wonder who O’Bambi’s Rove will be that gets the keys to the weather machine.
Then there is the duration of the event and the cross section of the Earth’s surface that is affected. In a worse case scenario it will probably suck the paint off your house and give your family a permanent orange afro.
Probably because no matter how big, massive, and dangerous the article makes it sound, it was probably almost undetectable in the big scheme of things. Something that probably happens often but we just don't have a lot of tools to measure.
SHOW OFF!!!!!
Are we doomed?
How doomed?
You mebbee mite cipher on this.
More evidence of how little we know about the earth and what effects it. Yet, to algore the discussion is over about glo-bull warming and everyone is certain we are causing it.
Roughly, how many watts of power would that be?
LOL!
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