A mysterious reaction has been detected in the Earth’s magnetic tail; to understand

About a year ago, data collected by the Indian space mission Chandrayaan-1 suggested that the Earth’s magnetic tail may be responsible for the water formation process on the Moon. Now, a team of researchers from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has published a. expression About a possible new and unusual event related to the planet’s magnetic tail.

Using Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) data from the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), scientists were able to observe some events that cause disturbances in the magnetic tail that often release large amounts of energy; Some of these events are so powerful that they can cause aurorae in some areas.

The bursts of energy have been called substorms, but these are different from those commonly used to classify the event. Normally, This phenomenon presents intense electric currents or fluctuations in the magnetic field.however, this was not recorded during data collection. The only relevant information detected during the MMS mission was related to the magnetic distortion itself.

“We want to see how the local physics observed by MMS affects the entire global magnetosphere. By comparing this event to more typical magnetic disturbances, we seek to improve our understanding of what causes the magnetic disturbance and the relationship between substorms and reconnection,” said SwRI postdoctoral researcher Dr. Andy Marshall in an official announcement.

Substorm in Earth’s magnetic tail

Substorms accompany magnetic reconnection, a phenomenon that occurs when magnetic field lines undergo a process that releases magnetic energy in the form of heat and kinetic energy.

The detection was made in 2017, but researchers were unable to observe electrical currents and magnetic field fluctuations. This may be because there was a single event recorded by MMS, but the devices were not able to detect all characteristics of the event.

MMS scientists plan to take new measurements to solve this mystery to determine whether this is a problem with the instruments or whether the event actually has the classic characteristics of a substorm.

“There may be significant differences between global magnetic tail convection patterns for substorms and non-substorm tail reconnection. We did not observe the movement of magnetic field lines on a global scale, and this unusual magnetic perturbation may be a very localized event observed by MMS. Otherwise, tail reconnection “It could reshape our understanding of the relationship between magnetic perturbations and magnetic perturbations,” adds Marshall.

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