Scientists are first observing a “space hurricane” swirling above the Earth

Scientists have long suspected that conditions in space could create storm-like conditions on Earth, but now they have photographic evidence of what researchers call a plasma space hurricane.

The authors of a new article published this week in Communications on Nature they say they have the first observations of a mass of plasma swirling over the North Pole that resembles a hurricane.

Using satellite imagery in 2014, teams from the University of Reading and Shandong University were able to create a 3D image of the 1,000-km-wide mass of raining electrons instead of water. Space storms above the Earth are created when the sun’s solar wind impacts the Earth’s atmosphere.

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“Tropical storms are associated with large amounts of energy, and these space hurricanes must be created by an unusually large and rapid transfer of solar wind energy and charged particles into the Earth’s upper atmosphere,” said Professor Mike Lockwood, a space scientist at the University of Reading said in a press release.

Lockwood and his team believe that these space hurricanes could also be created beyond our solar system.

“Plasma and magnetic fields in the planets’ atmosphere exist throughout the universe, so the findings suggest that space hurricanes should be a widespread phenomenon, ”Lockwood said.

What makes this finding so special is that hurricanes have also been observed in the lower atmospheres of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, but the existence of space hurricanes in the upper atmosphere of the planets had not been detected before.

Hurricanes occur in the Earth’s oceans over warm bodies of water. When warm, humid air rises, it creates a low-pressure area near the surface that sucks in the surrounding air, causing extremely strong winds and creating clouds that lead to the hurricane conditions we are used to.

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But at the top of the atmosphere, the solar wind is responsible for creating space hurricanes.

The solar wind is a flow of charged particles emanating from the corona or the atmosphere of the sun. Particles travel in all directions and interact with anything they encounter, even the Earth. Fortunately, our planet has a shield, the magnetosphere. Were it not for this magnetic field, the Earth would have big problems. Instead, most of the solar wind is deflected safely and continues its journey through space. If there were no magnetic field, the harmful radiation carried by the solar wind would reach the surface and endanger life.

Some of the particles that do not deviate into space are guided to the north and south poles. These particles then interact with the gases in our atmosphere causing these gases to move to a higher energy state, producing vibrant light samples, or the Auroras, also known as the northern or southern auroras.

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The auroral oval is the footprint in the atmosphere of the boundary between the very stretched field lines of the polar cap and the more normal field lines at lower latitudes. When the solar wind is strong, this limit approaches the equator.

The auroral oval usually clings close to the poles, but space hurricanes occur even closer to the pole.

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