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The future’s magnetic pull
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By European Space Agency
Video: 00:42:00 ESA’s Solar Orbiter may have taken another step towards solving the eighty-year-old mystery of why the Sun’s outer atmosphere is so hot.
On 3 March 2022, just a few months into Solar Orbiter’s nominal mission, the spacecraft’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) returned data showing for the first time that a magnetic phenomenon called reconnection was taking place persistently on tiny scales.
At that time, the spacecraft was about halfway between the Earth and the Sun. This enabled coordinated observations with NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) missions. The data from the three missions was then combined during the analysis.
Magnetic reconnection occurs when a magnetic field changes itself into a more stable configuration. It is a fundamental energy release mechanism in superheated gasses known as plasmas and is believed to be the major mechanism for powering large-scale solar eruptions. This makes it the direct cause of space weather, and a prime candidate for the mysterious heating of the Sun’s outer atmosphere.
It has been known since the 1940s that the Sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona, is much hotter than the Sun’s surface. While the surface glows at around 5 500°C, the corona is a rarified gas of around 2 million °C. How the Sun injects energy into its atmosphere to heat it to this tremendous temperature has been a major puzzle ever since.
In the past, magnetic reconnection has usually been seen during large-scale, explosive phenomena. However, the new result presents ultra-high-resolution observations of persistent small-scale (around 390 km across) reconnection in the corona. These are revealed to be a long-lived ‘gentle’ sequence compared to sudden explosive releases of energy that reconnection is usually associated with.
The 3 March 2022 event took place over the period of one hour. The temperatures around the point of the magnetic field where the magnetic field intensity drops to zero, known as the null-point, sustained itself at around 10 million °C, and generated an outflow of material that came in the form of discrete ‘blobs’ travelling away from the null point with a speed of around 80 km/s.
In addition to this continuous outflow, an explosive episode also took place around this null point, and lasted for four minutes.
Solar Orbiter’s results suggest that magnetic reconnection, at scales that were previously too small to be resolved, proceeds continually in both gentle and explosive ways. This is importantly because it means that reconnection can therefore persistently transfer mass and energy to the overlying corona, contributing to heating it.
These observations also suggest that even smaller and more frequent magnetic reconnections await discovery. The goal is now to observe these with EUI at even higher spatio-temporal resolution in the future around Solar Orbiter’s closest approaches to estimate what fraction of the corona’s heat may be transferred in this way.
Solar Orbiter’s most recent closest passage to the Sun took place on 10 April 2023. At that time, the spacecraft was just 29 percent the Earth’s distance from the Sun.
Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA.
These results are published in Nature Communications in a paper titled Ultra-high-resolution Observations of Persistent Null-point Reconnection in the Solar Corona. Principal author Prof. Xin Cheng, Nanjing University, China, and Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Göttingen, Germany led an international team of 24 collaborators.
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By European Space Agency
Despite being essential to life on Earth, the magnetic field isn’t something we can actually see in itself, or ever hear. But, remarkably, scientists at the Technical University of Denmark have taken magnetic signals measured by ESA’s Swarm satellite mission and converted them into sound – and for something that protects us, the result is pretty scary.
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By USH
If you look at the history of the earth, there are earth changes every 12,000 years that are also called ELE (Extinction Level Events). Events in which countless life forms on Earth disappear and we are also now in such a period according to Niburu.
Something is already going on at the moment. And that something has everything to do with the Earth's magnetic field and the magnetic poles. That could be one of the reasons, for example, that so many fish and other marine life are stranded, because their orientation point has changed position.
The North Magnetic Pole has been in a restricted area in northern Canada for centuries, but that has changed. And no small change either, because the magnetic north pole is now moving towards Siberia at unprecedented speed
In the Atlantic Ocean between South America and Africa, there is a vast region of Earth’s magnetic field, called the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA), that is about three times weaker than the field strength at the poles and has decreased in strength by a further 6%, as well as moving closer to the west.
According to ec.europa.eu the geomagnetic field has been decaying for the last 3,000 years,’ said Dr Nicolas Thouveny from the European Centre for Research and Teaching of Environmental Geosciences (CEREGE) in Aix-en-Provence, France. Historically, there was a 5 percent decline per century, which is now 5 percent per decade. If it continues to fall down at this rate, in less than one millennium we will be in a critical (period).
If Earth’s magnetic field were to decay significantly, it could collapse altogether and flip polarity – changing magnetic north to south and vice versa. The consequences of this process could be dire for our planet, first starting with our communications satellites in the highest orbits which go down and the most worryingly, we may be headed right for this scenario.
Whether this will eventually culminate in a magnetic pole reversal is perhaps less important than the fact that every time in our history when the magnetic north pole moves, violent things happen.
It happened about 12,000 years ago when things happened that caused the climate to change rapidly and various life forms disappeared from the earth.
If you go further back in history, you will see that this pattern repeats itself.
A channel on Youtube that has been dealing with the above issues for years is called Suspicious Observers. As you can see in the video below, we are currently in a period that occurs once every 12,000 years.
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By European Space Agency
With data from its closest pass of the Sun yet, the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft has found compelling clues as to the origin of magnetic switchbacks, and points towards how their physical formation mechanism might help accelerate the solar wind.
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By USH
Using information from ESA’s Swarm satellite mission, scientists have discovered a completely new type of magnetic wave that sweeps across the outermost part of Earth’s outer core every seven years.
This fascinating finding opens a new window into a world we can never see. This mysterious wave oscillates every seven years and propagates westward at up to 1500 kilometers a year.
Magnetic waves are likely to be triggered by disturbances deep within the Earth's fluid core, possibly related to buoyancy plumes. Each wave is specified by its period and typical length-scale, and the period depends on characteristics of the forces at play. For magneto-Coriolis waves, the period is indicative of the intensity of the magnetic field within the core.
The research team suggests that other such waves are likely to exist, probably with longer periods – but their discovery relies on more research.
Read full story at ESA.
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