The South Atlantic Anomaly is an interesting phenomenon, which varies over time and may be related to a zone of unusually dense rock.
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A bizarre dent in Earth’s magnetic field above the southern Atlantic Ocean weakens the southern lights, new research finds.
The South Atlantic Anomaly is a large, oval-shaped region over South America and the southern Atlantic Ocean where Earth’s magnetic field is weakest, says Live Science.
The anomaly is already well known for allowing charged particles from the sun to dip close to Earth’s surface, exposing satellites orbiting above to high levels of ionizing radiation, according to NASA.
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Researcher: “We absolutely cannot dump endless amounts of conductive dust into the magnetosphere and not expect some kind of impact. Multidisciplinary studies of this pollution are urgently needed.”
Sometimes known as a Solar particle event: These particles can penetrate the Earth’s magnetic field and cause partial ionization of the ionosphere. Energetic protons are a significant radiation hazard to spacecraft and astronauts.
Dr Mike McCulloch has been making truly remarkable discoveries about some of the mysteries of the cosmos over the last two decades. He has answers to fundamental questions such as ‘what causes the force that resists the change in speed and direction of any mass?’, ‘why do observations indicate that the inertial force varies with acceleration in the outer reaches of galaxies?’ and ‘how can we tap into the implicated energy fields to generate propellant-less thrust, and potentially generate electrical energy to power our homes, industries and vehicles?’. His published papers cover the first two of these questions, and touch on the third, although there’s plenty more to be teased out of the implications of his Quantised Inertia theory. The third question is the acid test.
Mike believes science has to have practical, applicable results, and for the last few years, he has been successfully generating those at his lab in Plymouth University, funded by DARPA. He has been getting measurable thrust from purely electrical input. Other collaborating labs have similar results. Exciting times indeed.
But like many scientists who threaten the established and accepted theory in their field, his work has been largely ignored because it falsifies mainstream ‘dark matter’ theory, or dismissed because it ‘must be impossible’. Although he has got measurable results, DARPA funding is ending, and he has no more teaching work to return to at Plymouth University. Mike wants, as far as possible, to keep the ongoing developments of QI publicly accessible, by crowdfunding. He needs our help to fund and equip a new lab, and set up a ‘Horizon Institute’, online initially, to enable the collaboration of academics and citizen scientists. Please read his message below, and then I’ll let you know how you can help.
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. Earth’s rings ‘are made of electricity–a donut-shaped circuit carrying millions of amps around our planet.’ But proton auroras are ‘still mysterious’.
May 15, 2023: Europeans are still trying to wrap their minds around what happened after sunset on April 23, 2023. Everyone knew that a CME was coming; photographers were already outside waiting for auroras. But when the auroras appeared, they were very strange.
“I had never seen anything quite like it,” says Heiko Ulbricht of Saxony, Germany. “The auroras began to tear themselves apart, pulsating as they formed individual blobs that floated high in the sky.”
“It literally took my breath away,” he says. “My pulse was still racing hours later!” The same blobs were sighted in France and Poland, and in Denmark they were caught flashing like a disco strobe light.
Ordinary auroras don’t act like this.
Indeed, “these were not ordinary auroras,” confirms space physicist Toshi Nishimura of Boston University. “They are called ‘proton auroras,’ and they come from Earth’s ring current system.”
March 24, 2023: Forecasters did not see this one coming. On March 23-24, auroras spread into the United States as far south as New Mexico (+32.8N) during a severe (category G4) geomagnetic storm–the most intense in nearly 6 years. The cause of the storm is still unclear; it may have been the ripple effect of a near-miss CME on March 23rd.
“Aurora pillars were visible from Shenandoah National Park in Central Virginia,” says Peter Forister, who photographed the light show at latitude +38.7 degrees:
“Beautiful red and green colors were visible to the naked eye around 11 pm local time,” he says. Other notable low-latitude sightings were made in Colorado (+38.7N), Missouri (+40.2N), Colorado again (+38.3N), Nebraska (+41N) and North Carolina (+36.2N). More than half of all US states were in range of the display.
Not every light in the sky was the aurora borealis, however. There was also
Some bold claims made here. Results needed to back them up.
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New research shows that a “solar clock” based on the sun’s magnetic field, rather than the presence or absence of sunspots, can precisely describe and predict many key changes throughout the solar cycle, says Eurekalert.
The new framework offers a significant improvement over the traditional sunspot method, because it can predict surges in dangerous solar flares or changing weather trends years in advance.
It also accurately describes many more parameters related to the solar cycle than sunspots alone.
August 4, 2022: Seeing one blue jet is rare. Photographer Matthew Griffiths just caught several of them over the Big Bend National Park in Texas. “This is by far the best,” he says:
Above: A blue jet emerges from a thunderhead in Big Bend National Park, photographed by Matthew Griffiths in Marfa, Texas: more.
Griffiths is an amateur photographer, primarily interested in wildlife and the Milky Way. “On July 28th, I was starting a five night West Texas road trip to capture the Milky Way,” he says. “But with thunderstorms in the distance I decided to try for red sprites instead.”
He ended up photographing the sprite’s elusive cousin, the blue jet. First recorded by cameras on the space shuttle in 1989, blue jets are part of a growing menagerie of cloudtop “transient luminous events” such as sprites, ELVES and green ghosts. They are all elusive, but blue…
Solar flare erupting from a sunspot [image credit: space.com]
Who knew!? – asks ScienceAlert. The article links to an interesting new paper on solar cycles, which makes some predictions for the current SC 25 (see section 3.2: Forecasting Using the Solar Unit Cycle). One of those is that it should end in October 2031 ± 9 months, and the authors go on to suggest forthcoming NASA and ESA missions make it probable that ‘Cycle 25 will be the last solar activity cycle that is not fully understood.’
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Something weird is going on with the Sun.
So far, almost every day in 2022 it has erupted in flares and coronal mass ejections, some of which were the most powerful eruptions our star is capable of.
By itself, an erupting Sun is not weird. It erupts regularly as it goes through periods of high and low activity, in cycles that last roughly 11 years.
The current activity is significantly higher than the official NASA and NOAA predictions for the current solar cycle, and solar activity has consistently exceeded predictions as far back as September 2020.
But a solar scientist will tell you that even this isn’t all that weird.
Caption: This data visualization shows the ICON spacecraft in orbit around Earth. The green arrows show the strong, high-altitude winds—known as atmospheric tides—detected by ICON’s MIGHTI wind imager. These winds are not uniform and can be altered by changes in the lower-altitude atmosphere. This, in turn, changes the particle motion high in the ionosphere. Changes in plasma at 370 miles above Earth’s surface was also detected by ICON as shown in red. Magnetic field lines are shown in magenta and turn yellow as measurements of winds detected by MIGHTI (green arrows) influence the direction of plasma (red arrows). Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio/William T. Bridgman
=== One researcher said: “We found half of what causes the ionosphere to behave as it does right there in the data”. The hunt is on for the other half. Link includes animations.
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What happens on Earth doesn’t stay on Earth, says Phys.org.
Using observations from NASA’s ICON mission, scientists presented the first direct measurements of Earth’s long-theorized dynamo on the edge of space: a wind-driven electrical generator that spans the globe 60-plus miles above our heads.
The dynamo churns in the ionosphere, the electrically charged boundary between Earth and space.
It’s powered by tidal winds in the upper atmosphere that are faster than most hurricanes and rise from the lower atmosphere, creating an electrical environment that can affect satellites and technology on Earth.
Nov. 22, 2021: The biggest geomagnetic storm in years erupted this month when a Cannibal CME slammed into Earth’s magnetic field. Auroras spread as far south as California and New Mexico. Upon closer inspection, however, not all of those lights were auroras. Some were “SARs.”
SARs are pure red arcs of light that ripple across the sky during strong geomagnetic storms. Here’s an example from Finland in 2018:
“The SAR was visible to the naked eye for nearly 30 minutes and, after fading a bit, remained visible to my camera for another hour and a half,” recalls photographer Matti Helin.
On Nov 4, 2021, Earth experienced a veritable SAR storm. “We photographed SARs as far south as the McDonald Observatory in Texas,” reports Jeff Baumgardner of Boston University’s Center for Space Physics. “The bands of light swept over our cameras near Boston, then headed south. We knew something special was…
Wikipedia says: ‘Within the Solar System there are five candidates for Schumann resonance detection besides the Earth: Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn’s biggest moon Titan.’ The frequencies reported from Mars in 2009 are also found on Earth.
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The interaction of dust particles in Martian dust storms may cause electric fields that are powerful enough to have charges that induce standing electromagnetic waves known as Sсhumann resonances, reports Phys.org.
This is the conclusion drawn by physicists from HSE University, the Space Research Institute, and MIPT. The paper was published in the journal Icarus.
Mars has been a focus of active study over the last decade, with researchers looking at possible space missions to the planet. Knowledge about the Martian atmosphere increases the chances that such missions will be successful.
In particular, the behavior of dust particles and the plasma-dust system on the surface of Mars should be taken into account in planning space trips.
Report: ‘With its steady stream of temperature measurements, GOLD is painting a picture of an upper atmosphere much more sensitive to the magnetic conditions around Earth than previously thought.’ Interesting – does this impact climate models?
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New results from NASA satellite data show that space weather—the changing conditions in space driven by the sun—can heat up Earth’s hottest and highest atmospheric layer, says Phys.org.
The findings, published in July in Geophysical Research Letters, used data from NASA’s Global Observations of the Limb and Disk, or GOLD mission. Launched in 2018 aboard the SES-14 communications satellite, GOLD looks down on Earth’s upper atmosphere from what’s known as geosynchronous orbit, effectively “hovering” over the western hemisphere as Earth turns.
GOLD’s unique position gives it a stable view of one entire face of the globe—called the disk—where it scans the temperature of Earth’s upper atmosphere every 30 minutes. GOLD scans the thermosphere from a position in geostationary orbit, which stays over one particular spot on Earth as it orbits and the planet rotates.
“We found results that were not previously possible because of the kind of data that we get from GOLD,” said Fazlul Laskar, who led the research. Dr. Laskar is a research associate at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Sept. 20, 2021: No solar storms? No problem. Earth has learned to make its own auroras. New results from NASA’s THEMIS-ARTEMIS spacecraft show that a type of Northern Lights called “diffuse auroras” comes from our own planet–no solar storms required.
Diffuse auroras look a bit like pea soup. They spread across the sky in a dim green haze, sometimes rippling as if stirred by a spoon. They’re not as flamboyant as auroras caused by solar storms. Nevertheless, they are important because they represent a whopping 75% of the energy input into Earth’s upper atmosphere at night. Researchers have been struggling to understand them for decades.
Above: Diffuse auroras and the Big Dipper, photographed by Emmanuel V. Masongsong in Fairbanks, AK
“We believe we have found the energy source for these auroras,” says UCLA space physicist Xu Zhang, lead author of papers reporting the results in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space…
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Quote: ‘STEVE is a recently identified atmospheric phenomenon caused by supersonic plasma jets flowing at altitudes >100 km.’ Scientists continue to wrestle with its electromagnetic mysteries.
Nov. 22, 2020: Just when you thought STEVE couldn’t get any weirder. A new paper published in the journal AGU Advances reveals that the luminous purple ribbon we call “STEVE” is often accompanied by green cannonballs of light that streak through the atmosphere at 1000 mph.
“Citizen scientists have been photographing these green streaks for years,” says Joshua Semeter of Boston University, lead author of the study. “Now we’re beginning to understand what they are.”
STEVE is a recent discovery. It looks like an aurora, but it is not. The purple glow is caused by hot (3000 °C) rivers of gas flowing through Earth’s magnetosphere faster than 13,000 mph. This distinguishes it from auroras, which are ignited by energetic particles raining down from space. Canadian aurora watchers first called attention to the phenomenon about 10 years ago, whimsically naming it STEVE; researchers have been studying it ever since.
More unexplained goings-on as the solar wind’s charged particles reach Earth’s ionosphere. For the latest photos showing bright green light, see the source article here.
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The purple-and-green, atmospheric light show nicknamed STEVE just got even stranger, says Science News.
STEVE, short for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement, is a sky glow that appears south of the northern lights (SN: 3/15/18).
STEVE’s main feature is a mauve band of light formed by a stream of plasma flowing westward through the atmosphere — a different phenomenon from the one that gives rise to auroras (SN: 4/30/19).
But STEVE’s purple arc is often accompanied by a “picket fence” of vertical green stripes.
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Scientists report electric fields naturally occurring in the comet’s atmosphere in connection with its auroras. NASA calls them electromagnetic emissions.
Sept. 22, 2020: Imagine putting your thumb on a garden hose and sending a jet of water into the sky. At the apex of the stream, auroras form. It turns out, some comets can actually perform this trick.
In a paper published this week in Nature Astronomy, researchers described how comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko turns vaporous jets of water into auroras.
The European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft observed the weird lights while it was orbiting Comet 67P in 2014-2016. At first researchers misunderstood what the glow was. It couldn’t be an aurora, could it? For one thing, the comet doesn’t even have a magnetic field–a key ingredient of geomagnetic storms. Also, the lights of Comet 67P are invisible to the human eye. They shine at far ultraviolet wavelengths, unlike the familiar red and green curtains that dance around Earth’s poles.
“Nevertheless, they are auroras,” says Marina Galand of Imperial College London…
This twitter video caught my eye last night, it was taken near Miami a few nights ago. It shows mysterious lights, confirmed from many sources and featured on national US TV channels where it’s reported answers are being demanded from the Pentagon.
During a total solar eclipse, the Sun’s corona and prominences are visible to the naked eye [image credit: Luc Viatour / https://Lucnix.be ]
There’s an interesting time-series animation of the solar corona here. Clear differences in the corona at solar minimum compared to maximum were observed by the globetrotting researchers.
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While the world has been dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have been hard at work studying the solar corona, the outermost atmosphere of the sun which expands into interplanetary space, reports Phys.org.
This stream of charged particles radiating from the surface of the sun is called the solar wind and expands to fill the entire solar system.
The properties of the solar corona are a consequence of the sun’s complex magnetic field, which is produced in the solar interior and extends outward.
A new study by IfA graduate student Benjamin Boe, published Wednesday, June 3rd in the Astrophysical Journal, used total solar eclipse observations to measure the shape of the coronal magnetic field with higher spatial resolution and over a larger area than ever before.
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