Magnetosphere tagged posts

A small team of astrophysicists at the University of California, Los Angeles, working with colleagues from the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Colorado, Boulder, has found evidence that Alfvén waves in space plasmas speed up ion beams, resulting in the creation of small-scale acoustic waves that in turn generate heat in the magnetosphere.

In their study, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group used data from the four-spacecraft Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission that took place in 20...

Like a supersonic jet being blasted with high-speed winds, Earth is constantly being bombarded by a stream of charged particles from the sun known as solar wind.

Just like wind around a jet or water around a boat, these solar wind streams curve around Earth’s magnetic field, or magnetosphere, forming on the sunward side of the magnetosphere a front called a bow shock and stretching it into a wind sock shape with a long tail on the nightside.

Dramatic changes to the solar wind alter the structure and dynamics of the magnetosphere...

On Feb. 4, 2022, SpaceX launched 49 satellites as part of Elon Musk’s Starlink internet project, most of which burned up in the atmosphere days later. The cause of this more than US$50 million failure was a geomagnetic storm caused by the sun.

Geomagnetic storms occur when space weather hits and interacts with the Earth. Space weather is caused by fluctuations within the sun that blast electrons, protons and other particles into space. When space weather reaches Earth, it triggers many complicated processes that can cause a lot of trouble for anything in orbit. And engineers are working to better understand these risks and defend satellites against them.

What causes space weather?

The sun is always releasing a steady amount of charged particles into space...

Newly analyzed data from the Galileo spacecraft’s flybys of one of Jupiter’s moons two decades ago is yielding fresh insights: the magnetic field around the moon Ganymede makes it unlike any other in the solar system. Far across the solar system, from where Earth appears merely as a pale blue dot, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft spent eight years orbiting Jupiter. During that time, the hearty spacecraft – slightly larger than a full-grown giraffe – sent back spates of discoveries on the gas giant’s moons, including the observation of a magnetic environment around Ganymede that was distinct from Jupiter’s own magnetic field...