• 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

Space Hurricanes Are Now A Thing – And They Happen A Lot

August 7, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Just three years ago, researchers discovered a new geomagnetic phenomenon. Dubbed “space hurricanes”, scientists saw huge swirling arms of plasma in the Earth’s magnetosphere hundreds of kilometers long around a calm “eye of the storm”, just like in a regular hurricane. These events can disrupt satellites in low-Earth orbit and even cause aurorae closer to the ground – and they occur more often than thought.

Advertisement

Initially, the discovery was exclusive to the Northern Hemisphere, likely due to more people living near or within the polar region in the North compared to the South. More people means more scientific instruments and observations. However, now scientists have quantified and qualified what space hurricanes are like in the Southern Hemisphere.

It appears there aren’t any major differences between the two hemispheres. Between 2005 and 2016, there were 329 space hurricanes in the Northern Hemisphere and 259 in the Southern Hemisphere. Space hurricanes are more likely to occur in the dayside polar cap at a magnetic latitude greater than 80°, very close to the magnetic poles. They are strongly dependent on the interplanetary magnetic field, the solar cycle, and even the Earth’s seasons.

Space hurricanes are more likely to occur in summer and during the daytime, suggesting that sunlight exposure and magnetic tilt both play a role in the hurricanes. Unfortunately, their high latitude and daytime occurrence make it unlikely they can be witnessed by human eyes.

The team estimates the average velocity for the plasma in space hurricanes is 1 kilometer per second (2,237 miles per hour). That sounds pretty fast already, but it is about 10 times faster than the average plasma found around the polar regions.

Advertisement

Understanding these events is important as they might play a big role in space weather. The work helps create a three-dimensional picture of these magnetic vortices and how they affect the lower atmosphere. The goal is to be able eventually to be able to predict these hurricanes and be ready to mitigate some of their effects.

The study is published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Bolivian president calls for global debt relief for poor countries
  2. Five Seasons Ventures pulls in €180M fund to tackle human health and climate via FoodTech
  3. Humanity’s Journey To A Metal-Rich Asteroid Launches Today. Here’s How To Watch
  4. Ancient DNA Reveals People Caught Leprosy From Adorable Woodland Critters In Medieval England

Source Link: Space Hurricanes Are Now A Thing – And They Happen A Lot

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • What Alternatives Are There To The Big Bang Model?
  • Magnetic Flip Seen Around First Photographed Black Hole Pushes “Models To The Limit”
  • Something Out Of Nothing: New Approach Mimics Matter Creation Using Superfluid Helium
  • Surströmming: Why Sweden’s Stinky Fermented Fish Smells So Bad (But People Still Eat It)
  • First-Ever Recording Of Black Hole Recoil Captured During Merger – And You Can Listen To It
  • The Moon Is Moving Away From Earth At A Rate Of About 3.8 Centimeters Per Year. Will It Ever Drift Apart?
  • 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