Heat Wave: ERAU Researchers Discover How Solar Winds Heat Ions Across Earth

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A discovery made by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University researchers about space plasma might help answer one of the burning questions in solar physics: How is the sun’s corona heated? It could also someday reveal a pathway tomaking clean nuclear fusion power a reality. Katariina Nykyri, a physics professor, and Tommy Moore, a doctoral student — both researchers at Embry-Riddle’s Center for Space and AtmosphericResearch (CSAR) — published their findings on how solar wind transfers energy across Earth’s magnetic field barrier in the September 2016 issue of Nature Physics. Together with Andy Dimmock from Aalto University in Espoo, Finland, they dug deep into sensor data from the European Space Agency’s Cluster satellites to discover how solar wind interacting with Earth’s magnetic field is responsible for heating particles in Earth’s magnetosphere.
PLASMA POWER
Solar wind — a continuous flow of plasma comprised of mostly electrons and protons — streams away from the sun at speeds up to 1 million miles per hour, hurtling its way toward Earth and other objects in the solar system. Embedded in that solar wind are elements of the sun’s magnetic field that interact with Earth’s magnetosphere, a boundary layer created by the magnetic field around the Earth that is impenetrable to solar wind.
“The Earth’s magnetic field acts as a shield from these particles. Without our magnetic field, they would strip off our atmosphere,” Moore says. “The sun is a source of energy, but particles can’t cross straight over. We’re looking to see how this energy is transported into the inner parts of the Earth’s magnetosphere.”
A key to answering that question lies within a common phenomenon known as the Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) instability. As the sun’s plasma flows alongside the Earth’s relatively stationary plasma, the magnetic field boundary begins to ripple, forming waves measuring approximately 36,000 km from peak to peak.
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