• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

How Mysterious Space Waves Cross The Turbulent “Shock” To Affect Earth

January 17, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

The collision of the solar wind and the Earth’s magnetic field creates an obstacle known as the shock. On the Earthward side of this barrier, forces outside generate electromagnetic waves, known as PC3 waves, that sometimes reach the surface. Outside the shock is a region known as the foreshock that has waves of its own, called 30 s waves, but it has taken astronomers decades from their discovery to understand the 30 s-PC3 connection. Since PC3 waves can pose a threat to satellites, the question has practical significance.

A team led by Dr Lucile Turc of the University of Helsinki have provided an answer to this long-standing question in Nature Physics.

Advertisement

“How the waves would survive passing through the shock has remained a mystery since the waves were first discovered in the 1970s. No evidence of those waves has ever been found on the other side of the shock”, Turc said in a statement. 

Turc and co-authors modeled conditions in the foreshock and found their model included similar, but less easily detectable, waves to our magnetic bubble, but only just. “Once it was known what and where to look for, clear signatures of the waves were found in satellite data, confirming the numerical results”, Turc said. 

The original discovery of foreshock waves led to proposals that they cross the shock unchanged to alter conditions on the inside. However, Turc found that the goings on within the foreshock and on this side are connected, but not identical.

Advertisement

They concluded that the solar wind is compressed and heated in its passage through the foreshock, but the extent to which this occurs is constantly changing, depending on the way previous waves have influenced the shock. The shock is highly turbulent, unsurprisingly considering the impact of the nearly unstoppable solar wind on the barely moveable geomagnetic field. This turbulence makes waves seen against such a background hard to spot.

Having crossed the shock, the waves become a small contributor to space weather, which can cause awe-inspiring auroras or fry the circuitry of satellites. The waves induced by foreshock activity represent only a small part of this, Turc says, but nevertheless need to be understood if we are to grasp the whole. Moreover, investigating them represents a chance to study other examples where streams of charged particles encounter magnetic fields, such as within clusters rich with newborn and exploding stars.

The paper is open access in Nature Physics.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Biden and China’s Xi discuss managing competition, avoiding conflict in call
  2. Evergrande bondholders don’t expect coupon payment on Thursday – source
  3. Factors driving hot Canadian inflation still seem temporary, central bank chief says
  4. Oldest Remains Of Planets In Milky Way Discovered, And They’re Nearby

Source Link: How Mysterious Space Waves Cross The Turbulent "Shock" To Affect Earth

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Are Space-Made Medicines The Future? Find Out More In Issue 38 Of CURIOUS – Out Now
  • An Alien-Like Fish With A See-Through Head And Green Eyes Lurks In The Ocean’s Dark Depths
  • Africa Wants To Change Misleading World Map, The “Wow!” Signal Was Likely From An Extraterrestrial Source, And Much More This Week
  • A “Good Death”: How Do Doctors Want To Die?
  • People Are Throwing Baby Puffins Off Cliffs In Iceland Again – But Why?
  • Yet Another Ancient Human Skull Turns Out To Be Denisovan
  • Gen Z Might Not Be On Course For A Midlife Crisis – Good News, Right? Wrong
  • Glowing Plants, Punk Ankylosaur, And Has The Wow! Signal Been Solved?
  • Pulsar Fleeing A Supernova Spotted Where Neither Of Them Should Be
  • 20 Years After Hurricane Katrina: Is It Time For A New Approach To Hurricane Classification?
  • Dog Named Scribble Replicates Quantum Factorization Records – So We Tried It Too
  • How Old Is The Solar System? (And How Can We Tell?)
  • Next Week, A Record-Breaking Over 7 Billion People Will See The Total Lunar Eclipse
  • The Goblin Shark Has The Fastest Jaws In The Ocean, Firing Like A Slingshot At Speeds Of 3.1-Meters-Per-Second
  • We Thought Geological Boundaries Were Random. Now, A New Study Has Identified Hidden Patterns
  • Do Fish Sleep?
  • The Biblical Flood Myth That Inspired Noah’s Ark Had A Sinister Twist
  • Massive Review Of 19 Autism Therapies Finds No Strong Evidence And Lack Of Safety Data
  • Giant City-Swallowing Cracks In Earth’s Surface Are A “New Geo-Hydrological Hazard”
  • Three Incredible Telescopes Looked At The Butterfly Nebula To Learn Where Earth Came From
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version