NASA Spacecraft Finds New Magnetic Process in Turbulent Space

Complete transcript available.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Joy Ng

Music credits: ‘Think Tank’ and ‘Natural Time Cycles’ by Laurent Dury from Killer Tracks

Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.

In a turbulent magnetic environment, magnetic field lines become scrambled. As the field lines cross, intense electric currents (shown here as bright regions) form and eventually trigger magnetic reconnection (indicated by a flash), which is an explosive event that releases magnetic energy accumulated in the current layers and ejects high-speed bi-directional jets of electrons. NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission witnessed this process in action as it flew through the electron jets the turbulent boundary just at the edge of Earth’s magnetic environment.

Credit: NASA Goddard’s Conceptual Image Lab/Lisa Poje

Simulations by: University of Chicago/Colby Haggerty; University of Delaware/Tulasi Parashar

Watch this video on the NASA.gov Video YouTube channel.

Earth is surrounded by a protective magnetic environment — the magnetosphere —shown here in blue, which deflects a supersonic stream of charged particles from the Sun, known as the solar wind. As the particles flow around the Earth’s magnetosphere, it forms a highly turbulent boundary layer called the magnetosheath, shown in yellow. Scientists, like those involved with NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, are studying this turbulent region to help us learn more about our dynamic space environment.

Credit: NASA Goddard/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith; NASA Goddard’s Conceptual Image Lab/Josh Masters

Watch this video on the NASA.gov Video YouTube channel.

Earth is surrounded by a protective magnetic environment — the magnetosphere —shown here in blue, which deflects a supersonic stream of charged particles from the Sun, known as the solar wind. As the particles flow around the Earth’s magnetosphere, it forms a highly turbulent boundary layer called the magnetosheath, shown in yellow. Scientists, like those involved with NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, are studying this turbulent region to help us learn more about our dynamic space environment.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith

The four identical MMS spacecraft — flying through this region in a tight pyramid formation — saw the event in 3-D. The arrows in the data visualization below show the hundreds of observations MMS took to measure the changes in particle motion and the magnetic field.

Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio/Tom Bridgman

In a turbulent magnetic environment, magnetic field lines become scrambled. As the field lines cross, intense electric currents (shown here as bright regions) form and eventually trigger magnetic reconnection (indicated by a flash), which is an explosive event that releases magnetic energy accumulated in the current layers and ejects high-speed bi-directional jets of electrons. NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission witnessed this process in action as it flew through the electron jets the turbulent boundary just at the edge of Earth’s magnetic environment.

Credit: NASA Goddard’s Conceptual Image Lab/Lisa Poje

Simulations by: University of Chicago/Colby Haggerty; University of Delaware/Tulasi Parashar

For the first time, magnetic reconnection was seen in the magnetosheath — the boundary between our magnetosphere and the solar wind that flows throughout the solar system and one of the most turbulent regions in near-Earth space.

Credit: NASA Goddard/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith; NASA Goddard’s Conceptual Image Lab/Josh Masters

Just as gravity is one key to how things move on Earth, a process called magnetic reconnection is key to how electrically-charged particles speed through space. Scientists have observed this phenomenon many times in Earth’s vast magnetic environment, the magnetosphere.

Credit: NASA Goddard's Conceptual Image Lab