Scientists are observing a ‘space hurricane’ above Earth for the first time

Scientists have long suspected that conditions in space could create stormy conditions above Earth, but now they have visual evidence of what researchers call a plasma space hurricane.

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

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

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

Lockwood and his team believe these space hurricanes can also originate outside of our solar system.

“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.

What makes this find 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 atmospheres of planets has not been observed before.

Hurricanes occur in Earth’s oceans above warm bodies of water. When warm, moist air rises, it creates an area of ​​low pressure near the surface that draws in the surrounding air, creating extremely strong winds and clouds that lead to the hurricane conditions we’re used to.

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But in the upper atmosphere, solar wind is responsible for creating space hurricanes.

The solar wind is a stream of charged particles that come out of the corona, or the sun’s atmosphere. The particles travel in all directions and interact with everything they encounter, even the Earth. Fortunately, our planet has a shield, the magnetosphere. If it weren’t for this magnetic field, Earth would be in serious trouble. Instead, most of the solar wind is safely deflected and continues its journey through space. If there were no magnetic field, the harmful radiation carried by the solar wind would rise to the surface and be life-threatening.

Some particles that are not deflected in space are directed to the north and south poles. Those particles then interact with gases in our atmosphere, moving those gases into a higher energy state, producing vivid displays of light, or the Auroras, also known as the Northern or Southern light.

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The auroral oval is the atmospheric footprint of the boundary between the highly elongated field lines of the polar cap and the more normal field lines at lower latitudes. When the solar wind is strong, this boundary gets closer to the equator.

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

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