The AP is reporting:
New data from NASA's Themis mission, a quintet of satellites launched this winter, found the energy comes from a stream of charged particles from the sun flowing like a current through twisted bundles of magnetic fields connecting Earth's upper atmosphere to the sun.
The energy is then abruptly released in the form of a shimmering display of lights visible in the upper latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere...
To scientists' surprise, the geomagnetic storm powering the auroras raced 400 miles in a minute across the sky. Angelopoulos estimated the storm's power was equal to the energy released by a magnitude 5.5 earthquake."Nature was very kind to us," Angelopoulos said.
I wonder what he meant by that...
Thanks to Lucianne
3 comments:
I think this is the important part:
Although researchers have suspected the existence of wound-up bundles of magnetic fields that provide energy for the auroras, the phenomenon was not confirmed until May, when the satellites became the first to map their structure some 40,000 miles above the Earth's surface.
I was a little confused at the tone of the article at first because my basic plasma physics class contained detailed calculations and descriptions of the Aurora Borealis. in fact i think the energy calculations was a homework project.
The reporter was trumpeting the discovery as if no one knew about it before. Kinda weird.
But yes, the magnetosphere of the earth as well as that of the sun play an incredible part in protecting our fragile little blue speck from the harshness of the universe. Our miraculous magnetic field is one of the large differences between Earth and Mars; Mars has a far smaller field which allows its atmosphere to be literally blown off into space by the solar wind.
pretty cool stuff, especially since we have NO IDEA how our magnetic field is generated, or what keeps it going.
ha ha. silly shared computer. I (josh) must have been logged in as jannell on accident.
Or she took a couple of graduate space physics classes on the side without telling me...
I must admit that I was impressed when I saw Jannell talking about a homework project in her basic plasma physics class that calculated the energy involved in the Aurora Borealis. I figured it might have been a class taken to "enter into Josh's world" or something like that.
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