Illustration of Earth’s magnetospheric bow shock. Satellites both in front of (to the left) and behind the bow shock (to the right) detected telltale magnetic signatures that suggest clouds of space dust were passing them. Credit: NASA
A 40-year-old enigma about ghostly magnetic fields in interplanetary space may have finally been solved by new data from a constellation of 12 satellites in near-Earth space.
New research in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters finds that fine dust from pulverized space rocks is riding the solar wind past the spacecraft, which detected the cloud of fine debris as a temporary change in the local magnetic field.
If the discovery is correct, it points to a new way to study the little-understood intersection between the realms of the ve...
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