Nasa discovers third energy field around the Earth – Knowledge

Sometimes in science, things suddenly happen very quickly. For around 60 years, researchers have been racking their brains over the so-called polar wind. Satellites that flew hundreds of kilometers above the Earth’s two poles in the 1960s measured a steady stream of charged particles escaping upwards into space, i.e. against the planet’s gravity. The cause of this particle escape remained unclear.

Now a 15-minute rocket flight may have solved the mystery of the polar wind. Measurement data from NASA’s “Endurance” mission suggest that the Earth has a third energy field that causes buoyancy. The “global ambipolar field” spans the Earth and is therefore as fundamental as the planet’s gravity and magnetic field. The researchers report in the journal Nature.

Scientists have long suspected that a third energy field exists around the Earth. There is no other explanation for the polar wind made up of charged particles. A certain amount of buoyancy could be caused by the sun’s radiation causing light particles such as electrons to be thrown out of the atmosphere – similar to steam rising from a kettle of hot water. However, the polar wind consists mainly of cool particles. This is why researchers have long suspected an energy field, but have never been able to prove it.

That only changed on May 11, 2022. On that day, the rocket lifted off from the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen Endurance named after the ship of the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, who set off for the Antarctic in 1914. The location for the rocket launch was chosen so that the Endurance to follow the course of the polar wind as accurately as possible. The measurement began at an altitude of around 250 kilometers, and the probe reached a maximum altitude of 768 kilometers, not quite twice the altitude of the International Space Station ISS. 19 minutes after takeoff, the probe crashed back into the sea off Greenland.

Nevertheless, the short parabolic flight was enough to detect the ambipolar field for the first time with the help of a new instrument: between 250 and 768 kilometers altitude, the probe registered a voltage difference of 0.55 volts. “Half a volt is almost nothing – that’s only about as strong as a watch battery,” Glyn Collinson, the mission’s chief scientist, is quoted as saying in a NASA statement. “But that’s exactly the right strength to explain the polar wind.”

The field is created by the dynamics within the atmosphere: gravity causes the heavier, positively charged atomic nuclei to sink downwards, while the slightest impact can catapult the much lighter, negatively charged electrons far out into space. This creates an electric field that counteracts the gravitational effect.

Hydrogen nuclei, which are most commonly found in the polar wind, can experience an acceleration that is more than ten times greater than the Earth’s gravity – enough to shoot them into space at supersonic speed. Even much heavier oxygen ions leave the Earth’s atmosphere in this way. Collinson compares this to a “conveyor belt” that pushes the atmosphere towards space. The term “ambipolar” refers to the fact that forces act on both charges: the lighter electrons are pulled downwards by the heavier atomic nuclei, while at the same time electrons tug on the heavier atomic nuclei on the way up like a dog on a leash.

The researchers suspect that the ambipolar field could have had a decisive influence on the development of the atmosphere on Earth. Other planets such as Mars or Venus could also have such fields, as similar processes must be at work in their atmospheres. With the detection of the field on Earth, these phenomena can now be better researched.

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