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You could not know this, however Earth’s magnetic field has a tail. As the sun‘s solar wind buffets the planet, it leaves behind a type of lengthy shadow that trails out in our planet’s wake. Scientists name this magnetic tail, appropriately, the magnetotail. Sometimes, the magnetotail is strewn with magnetic storms.
However for the previous a number of years, scientists have identified of a thriller within the magnetotail: a lacking storm. They’ve discovered a signature of a storm, however no storm to really associate with it. NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission is now on the case.
MMS consists of 4 satellites that every one launched on the identical Atlas V rocket in 2015. Since then, the quartet has been learning Earth’s magnetopause: the frontier of the area dominated by the planet’s magnetic subject. The magnetopause is consistently aflame with magnetic reconnections, which confer with when the strains that make up a magnetic subject come collectively, break aside, then rejoin, creating good flurries of warmth and kinetic power. (These reconnections, in the event that they occur in Earth’s atmosphere, may cause auroras.)
Associated: 4 NASA Satellites to Seek Energy Eruptions in Earth’s Magnetic Field
Scientists name these flurries substorms. In 2017, MMS noticed the trademark magnetic reconnection of a substorm — however no precise substorm to associate with it. A substorm ought to include violent electrical currents and magnetic subject fluctuations, however MMS noticed traces of neither.
“We have now not regarded on the motion of the magnetic subject strains on a world scale, so it could possibly be that this uncommon substorm was a really localized incidence that MMS occurred to watch,” stated Andy Marshall, a postdoc on the Southwest Analysis Institute, in a statement. “If not, it might reshape our understanding of the connection between tail-side reconnection and substorms.”
So, for the following yr, MMS will measure the magnetic reconnections in Earth’s actual magnetic subject, whereas scientists on the bottom conduct simulations of the magnetic subject to grasp the way it behaves. By evaluating the 2, scientists hope they’ll clear up the thriller by higher understanding the exact relationship between reconnection and the occasions they trigger.
“It is attainable that vital variations exist between the worldwide magnetotail convection patterns for substorms and non-substorm tail reconnection,” Marshall stated.
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