Something that many scientists didn’t think would happen until lately will occur in the sky while you read this story. According to N.A.S.A, a magnetic doorway will open, bridging the 150 million km gap between the Earth and the Sun.
This gap will be traversed by hundreds of thousands of high-energy particles until it closes, which should occur around the time you reach the bottom of the page.
David Seebeck, a space physicist at N.A.S.A’s Goddard Space Flight Center, refers to it as a “flux transfer event” or “FTE.” I was certain they didn’t exist in 1998, but the evidence is now abundant. In fact, David Seebeck demonstrated their existence in 2008 in Huntsville, Alabama, during a plasma symposium when he presented his findings to a group of international space physicists.
N.A.S.A has found that in the future, these openings between the Sun and the Earth will happen every 8 minutes.
For a very long time, scientists believed that the Earth and the Sun were connected. High-energy particles from the Sun enter the magnetosphere, the magnetic bubble that envelops our planet, through the solar wind, and penetrate the magnetic shielding.
When the sun was active, “we used to imagine that this connection was permanent and that the solar wind may at any point travel into space close to Earth.” “We were wrong. Flares and the speed at which solar particles move have little impact on the linkages, which are not at all random. These doors open once every eight minutes.
The construction of these gateways was discussed by scientists. The Earth’s magnetic field pushes up against the Sun’s magnetic field on the dayside of the planet.
These two fields momentarily “reunite” every eight minutes, creating a channel for particles to flow through. The gateway is shaped like a magnetic cylinder that circles the entire planet. Five N.A.S.A THEMIS probes and four ESA Cluster spacecraft circled these cylinders, measuring their diameters and recording the particles that passed through them.
Seebeck adds, “They are real.” Now that Cluster and THEMIS have looked at gateways in the real world, scientists can use these observations to make computer models of portals and predict how they will act. Jimmy Rader, a space physicist at the University of New Hampshire, talked about one of these ideas at a presentation.
He told his coworkers that cylindrical portals start above the equator and then pass through the Earth’s winter pole. In December, gateways between the Sun and the Earth go through the North Pole. In July, the openings between the Sun and the Earth pass over the South Pole.
Seebeck says, “I think there are two kinds of these portals: active and passive.” Active portals are magnetic cylinders that are large energy conductors for the Earth’s magnetosphere. They make it easy for particles to move through and let a lot of energy through.
Magnetic cylinders known as passive portals have higher resistance to particles and fields. Particles and fields can’t flow through them as easily thanks to their internal structure (Active FTEs are formed at equatorial latitudes when the IMF is directed to the south; passive FTEs are formed at higher latitudes when the IMF is directed to the north). Seebeck has identified the characteristics of passive FTEs and has instructed his colleagues to search the THEMIS and Cluster data for hints.
“It’s possible that passive FTEs are important, but we won’t know for sure until we learn more about them.” Many questions remain unanswered: Why do portals show up every eight minutes? How do magnetic fields twist and curl inside a cylinder? Seebeck adds, “We’re giving it a lot of thought.”
At the same time, a new way to get to the sun is opening up high above you. How do you get and send data?
