Forum for Science, Industry and Business

NASA keeps watch over space explosions

Some fly out into space, while others are funneled along magnetic field lines into Earth's upper atmosphere where they create auroras, or wreak havoc on power grids in the case of an extremely large event.

In its second phase, NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission -- MMS -- is watching magnetic reconnection in action behind Earth, as shown here by the tangled blue and red magnetic field lines. View animated GIF: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/mms_wide.gif

Credit: Patricia Reiff/NASA Goddard/Joy Ng

NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, or MMS, has been observing such explosions­ -- created in a process called magnetic reconnection -- for three years.

Recently, in the second phase of its mission, MMS saw reconnection in Earth's magnetotail -- the part of Earth's magnetic environment trailing behind the planet, away from the Sun -- with enough resolution to reveal its true nature more clearly. The results have been published in the journal Science.

Magnetic reconnection occurs around Earth every day due to magnetic field lines twisting and reconnecting. It happens in different ways in different places, with different effects. In the magnetotail, for example, the process can create aurora near Earth.

In the magnetotail the event watched by MMS was found to fling particles symmetrically, unlike how it does on the sunward side of Earth. Out front, the solar wind -- a constant flow of charged particles from the Sun -- pushes into Earth's magnetic field.

Because of their different densities, the two sides connecting are unequal, which causes magnetic reconnection to occur asymmetrically. On the backside, however, in the magnetotail, the explosion stems from an entanglement of two sets of -- similarly intense -- Earth field lines, so the particles are accelerated nearly the same in both directions.

Magnetic reconnection also happens on the Sun and across the universe -- in all cases forcefully shooting out particles and driving much of the change we see in dynamic space environments -- so learning about it around Earth also helps us understand reconnection in faraway places where it's impossible to measure directly.

The more we understand about different types of magnetic reconnection, the more we can piece together what such explosions might look like elsewhere, and how we can better prepare for extreme events here on Earth.

Mara Johnson-Groh | EurekAlert!
Further information:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-keeps-watch-over-space-explosions
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aat2998

Im Focus: New studies increase confidence in NASA's measure of Earth's temperature

A new assessment of NASA's record of global temperatures revealed that the agency's estimate of Earth's long-term temperature rise in recent decades is accurate to within less than a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit, providing confidence that past and future research is correctly capturing rising surface temperatures.

The most complete assessment ever of statistical uncertainty within the GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP) data product shows that the annual values...

Im Focus: The geometry of an electron determined for the first time

Physicists at the University of Basel are able to show for the first time how a single electron looks in an artificial atom. A newly developed method enables them to show the probability of an electron being present in a space. This allows improved control of electron spins, which could serve as the smallest information unit in a future quantum computer. The experiments were published in Physical Review Letters and the related theory in Physical Review B.

The spin of an electron is a promising candidate for use as the smallest information unit (qubit) of a quantum computer. Controlling and switching this spin or...

Im Focus: Self-repairing batteries

UTokyo engineers develop a way to create high-capacity long-life batteries

Engineers at the University of Tokyo continually pioneer new ways to improve battery technology. Professor Atsuo Yamada and his team recently developed a...

Im Focus: Quantum Cloud Computing with Self-Check

With a quantum coprocessor in the cloud, physicists from Innsbruck, Austria, open the door to the simulation of previously unsolvable problems in chemistry, materials research or high-energy physics. The research groups led by Rainer Blatt and Peter Zoller report in the journal Nature how they simulated particle physics phenomena on 20 quantum bits and how the quantum simulator self-verified the result for the first time.

Many scientists are currently working on investigating how quantum advantage can be exploited on hardware already available today. Three years ago, physicists...

Im Focus: Accelerating quantum technologies with materials processing at the atomic scale

'Quantum technologies' utilise the unique phenomena of quantum superposition and entanglement to encode and process information, with potentially profound benefits to a wide range of information technologies from communications to sensing and computing.

However a major challenge in developing these technologies is that the quantum phenomena are very fragile, and only a handful of physical systems have been...