[freebeard]

Climate science is important.

But it's hard to keep up. Did you see the story on S0 about the turbulence in the electromagnetic wake of Earth in the Solar wind couples energy [more than predicted] to the planet? https://www.nasa.gov/feature/aurora-...hemis-mission/

It's the new constellation of THEMIS satellites.

By providing a broader picture than can be seen with the three THEMIS spacecraft or ground observations alone, the new models have shown that auroral beads are caused by turbulence in the plasma – a fourth state of matter, made up of gaseous and highly conductive charged particles – surrounding Earth. The results, recently published in the journals Geophysical Research Letters and Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, will ultimately help scientists better understand the full range of swirling structures seen in the auroras.

“THEMIS observations have now revealed turbulences in space that cause flows seen lighting up the sky as of single pearls in the glowing auroral necklace," said Evgeny Panov, lead author on one of the new papers and THEMIS scientist at the Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. “These turbulences in space are initially caused by lighter and more agile electrons, moving with the weight of particles 2000 times heavier, and which theoretically may develop to full-scale auroral substorms.”

Mysteries of Auroral Beads Formation
Auroras are created when charged particles from the Sun are trapped in Earth’s magnetic environment – the magnetosphere – and are funneled into Earth’s upper atmosphere, where collisions cause hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms and molecules to glow. By modelling the near-Earth environment on scales from tens of miles to 1.2 million miles, the THEMIS scientists were able to show the details of how auroral beads form.

As streaming clouds of plasma belched by the Sun pass Earth, their interaction with the Earth’s magnetic field creates buoyant bubbles of plasma behind Earth. Like a lava lamp, imbalances in the buoyancy between the bubbles and heavier plasma in the magnetosphere creates fingers of plasma 2,500 miles wide that stretch down towards Earth. Signatures of these fingers create the distinct bead-shaped structure in the aurora.

“There's been a realization that, all summed up, these relatively little transient events that happen around the magnetosphere are somehow important,” said David Sibeck, THEMIS project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We have only recently gotten to the point where computing power is good enough to capture the basic physics in these systems.”

In other news— super sun screen with inexpensive precursors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I50EEKzrOd4