Space hurricane is detected for the first time; understand

An international team of scientists led by Shandong University, in China, detected a space hurricane for the first time in history. The phenomenon happened in the upper atmosphere of the north pole of Terra. Until then, only hurricanes in the downtown atmosphere had been registered.

According to the study published in Nature Communications on February 22, the space hurricane lasted nearly 8 hours on August 20, 2014 and was recorded by four satellites from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), a meteorological monitoring program from the US Department of Defense U.S, during a series of observations.

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Mike Lockwood, co-author of the study and space scientist at the University of Reading, UK, stated in release that until now it was uncertain whether hurricanes of space plasma existed: “So proving this with such an impressive observation is incredible. Tropical storms are associated with large amounts of energy, and these space hurricanes must be created by an exceptionally large and rapid transfer of solar wind energy and charged particles to the Earth’s upper atmosphere. ”

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The hurricane was invisible to the naked eye and was shaped like a funnel with a silent “eye” in the center, surrounded by several spiral plasma arms rotating counterclockwise (ionized gas found throughout the solar system, including the atmosphere of the Earth). Instead of raining water, the space hurricane rained electrons directly into Earth’s upper atmosphere.

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

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“This study suggests that there are still intense local geomagnetic disturbances and energy deposits that are comparable to those of super storms,” ​​added Qing-He Zhang, research leader and professor at Shandong University.

For him, the discovery suggests that some indicators of geomagnetic activities used by scientists “do not adequately represent dramatic activity within space hurricanes”.

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