For the first time, a hurricane has been detected in Earth’s upper atmosphere. In 2014, satellites recorded a massive smooth swirl of plasma extending high into the magnetosphere that took hours to spread.
While we’ve never seen anything like it, its detection suggests that space hurricanes, as they are called, may be a common planetary phenomenon.
“Until now it was uncertain that even space plasma hurricanes existed, so to prove this with such a striking observation is unbelievable,” said space environmental physicist Mike Lockwood of the University of Reading in the UK.
Hurricanes in Earth’s lower atmosphere are common: powerful, rotating weather systems around a relatively calm center, accompanied by high winds and lashing that can cause massive amounts of damage in a very short time.
They’re not uncommon on other bodies, either: Jupiter and Saturn in particular are extremely turbulent places, not to mention churning plasma tornadoes deep in the sun’s atmosphere.
Space hurricanes, the new work reveals, are no different from their lower atmosphere cousins.
The detections were made on August 20, 2014 and revealed during a retrospective analysis led by Shandong University in China. According to the records, the hurricane appeared over the North Pole, measuring 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) in diameter.
Reaching from 110 kilometers to 860 kilometers in elevation, it consisted of multi-spiral-arm plasma, swirling counterclockwise at speeds of up to 2,100 meters per second (6,900 feet per second). However, the center was almost silent, as with hurricanes at a lower altitude.
However, unlike other hurricanes, the space hurricane rained electrons into the ionosphere. This had an amazing effect: a huge, cyclone-shaped aurora beneath the hurricane. The whole thing took nearly eight hours, depositing massive amounts of energy and momentum in the ionosphere.
Conditions were otherwise calm, which raised a mystery. A shower of charged particles in the solar wind’s ionosphere is what usually produces glowing green aurorae at Earth’s higher latitudes, but the solar conditions were relatively calm at the time. So the team turned to models to determine what caused the plasma ruckus.
“Tropical storms are associated with enormous amounts of energy, and these space hurricanes must be caused by an unusually large and rapid transfer of solar wind energy and charged particles to Earth’s upper atmosphere,” explains Lockwood.
We know that reconnecting magnetic field lines can transfer solar wind energy to the magnetosphere and ionosphere, so the team modeled this process and found that a reconnecting interplanetary magnetic field can even produce the features they observed in the space hurricane. when the solar wind is low. . In fact, the low solar wind may be key – it allows for a more efficient magnetic reconnection.
It also means that such storms can be very common.
“Plasma and magnetic fields in planets’ atmospheres exist throughout the universe, so the findings suggest that space hurricanes should be a widespread phenomenon,” Lockwood said.
There are also implications for the Earth. Knowing that aurorae could be the product of space hurricanes, and what these aurorae look like, could help us identify other such storms in the future.
It also shows that even if the geomagnetic conditions are relatively quiet, space can create extreme weather that can affect life on Earth and the sky above.
“This study suggests that local intense geomagnetic perturbations and energy deposits similar to those during superstorms still exist. This will update our understanding of the solar wind-magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling process under extremely quiet geomagnetic conditions,” said space physicist and lead author. , Qing-He Zhang from Shandong University.
“In addition, the space hurricane will lead to important space weather effects, such as increased air resistance from satellites, disruptions in high-frequency radio communication and more errors in the radar location above the horizon, satellite navigation and communication systems.”
The research is published in Nature Communications