Solar wind turbulence removes “Earth’s tail” and replaces it with wings!

Crater Net.. Agencies

Earth is constantly bombarded with charged particles from the sun, and scientists have discovered that a massive solar flare hit our planet with enough force to completely change its magnetic field.

Solar wind currents bend around the Earth’s magnetic field, or magnetosphere, like wind around a jet or water around a ship, and on the sunward side of the magnetosphere they form a front called a bow shock, or shock (when the magnetosphere of an astronomical body interacts with the plasma flowing around it (like the solar wind) which expands into a “wind spear” shape (a cloth bag shaped like an open shirt sleeve at either end which helps pilots figure out how to land against the wind) with a long tail on the night side.

However, astronomers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center discovered an explosion that occurred in April 2023 that disrupted the Earth’s natural magnetic field for two hours.

In an article published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Li-Jin Chen and his colleagues present unprecedented observations of this rare phenomenon that occurs during a coronal ejection (CME ).

CMEs typically travel faster than the Alfvén speed (named after physicist Hans Alvvén), which is the speed at which oscillating magnetic field lines move through a magnetic plasma, which can vary with the plasma environment.

Scientists analyzed observations from NASA’s Magnetic Multiscale (MMS) mission to find out what happened.

On April 24, 2023, the MMS mission noted that although the speed of the solar wind stream was fast, the Alfvén speed during a coronal mass ejection was powerful (where large bursts of plasma and magnetic energy erupt from the corona of solar) faster.

Usually, the solar wind travels faster than Alvvén. This anomaly caused a strange phenomenon: the Earth’s shock wave temporarily disappeared, allowing the plasma and magnetic field from the Sun to interact directly with the magnetosphere. At the same time, the narrow tail of the Earth’s wind changed.

The thin tail of the Earth’s wind has been replaced by structures called Alfvén wings, which connect the Earth’s magnetosphere to the active region of the Sun. This connection was the main plasma-carrying highway between the magnetosphere and the sun.

The scientists wrote in a research paper that this unique coronal discharge event provided new insight into how Alfvén wings form and evolve.

A similar process can occur around other magnetically active objects in our solar system and the universe, and scientists’ observations indicate that the formation of the aurora on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede could also be the result of Alfvén wings.