Whipping up a storm: Diagram illustrating how the vortices form on the dark side of the Earth.
Credit: Andreas Keiling, THEMIS/NASA
SYDNEY: A cluster of NASA probes have revealed the existence of vast "space tornadoes" which – at 70,000 km in length – are big enough to envelop the Earth, and produce electrical currents exceeding 100,000 amps.
The five THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) probes recorded the extent and power of these electrical funnels as they passed through them.
Ground measurements further showed that the tornadoes channel electrical current into Earth's ionosphere to create bright and colourful auroras.
Intense currents
Originating in the solar wind, the space tornadoes are rotating plasmas of hot, ionized gas flowing at speeds of more than one million km/h – far faster than the 300 km/h winds of terrestrial tornadoes, said Andreas Keiling, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The tornadoes are actually vortices created by the release of energy on the dark side of the Earth in the trailing 'magnetotail' region of the planet's magnetic field.
“What we observed we can call a space tornado – it looks very much like a tornado,” said Keiling. He presented the discovery on Thursday at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, Austria.
Both terrestrial and space tornadoes consist of funnel-shaped structures. Space tornadoes, however, generate huge amounts of electrical currents inside the funnel.
These currents flow along twisted magnetic field lines from space into the ionosphere where they power several processes, most notably bright auroras such as the Northern and Southern Lights, Keiling said.
Electrical connection
While these intense currents do not cause any direct harm to humans, on the ground they can damage man-made structures, such as power transformers.
NASA launched the THEMIS probes in February 2007 to solve a decades-long mystery about the origin of magnetic storms that power the Northern and Southern Lights.
The spacecraft observed these tornadoes, or "flow vortices," at a distance of about 40,000 miles from Earth. Simultaneous measurements by THEMIS ground observatories confirmed the tornadoes' connection to the ionosphere.
With the European Geosciences Union and the University of California, Berkeley.
Birkeland currents and the pinch effect?
So, can one safely assume these are equivalent to Birkeland currents (field-aligned currents) and are compressed into cylindrical / funnel-like shapes by the "pinch effect" (Bennett pinch) and associated Lorentz forces?
Best,
~Michael Gmirkin
Thats the first thing I
Thats the first thing I thought of when i read this Michael
Can These Winds be harnassed And Redirected and captured
Can These Winds be harnassed And redirected To a specific location and captured within another phenomina called "Zero-G waterbed" or Invisible Electrostatic Wall That could hold up a heavy object such as a green building?