One More Step Beyond Religion
Northern Lights, originally uploaded by Image Editor.
NASA scientists on the Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions in Substorms (THEMIS) project are one big step closer to understanding fully just how aurora borealis occurs.
Sphere: Related ContentThe earth is surrounded by magnetic field lines that stretch from the north to the south poles, like a giant bar magnet. But charged particles from the sun -- called the solar wind -- distort that magnetic field, pulling it into a long tail called the «magnetotail.»
The magnetic field lines from the north and the south poles stretch out and out, until finally, at the point about one third of the way to the moon's orbit, they snap back together and send charged particles flying back towards the earth.
However, scientists weren't sure whether this «reconnection point» snap triggered the substorms, or whether it was another event, called current disruption, which is a kind of large-scale «short circuit» of currents of charged particles that flow closer to the earth -- about one-sixth of the distance to the moon's orbit.
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