Scientists provide unpublished images of the elusive energy explosion

Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have captured a singular hard-to-visualize event involving a "magnetic reconnection" – the process by which rare particles and energy around the Earth collide, producing an explosion fast but powerful – in the magnetotail of the Earth, the magnetic environment trails behind the planet.

Magnetic reconnection has remained a mystery to scientists. They know that this exists and have documented the potential effects of energy explosions (sparks of the northern lights and perhaps ravaging power grids in the case of extremely important events), but they do not. Have not completely understood the details. In a study published in the journal ScienceScientists describe the first views of the critical details of how this energy conversion process works in Earth's magnetotail.

"It was a remarkable event," said Roy Torbert of the Space Science Center at UNH and Deputy Chief Investigator of the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, or MMS of NASA. "We have long known that this occurs under two types of schemes: asymmetrical and symmetrical, but it's the first time we see a symmetrical process."

Magnetic reconnection occurs every day around the Earth due to the twisting and reconnection of magnetic field lines. This occurs in different ways in different places, with different effects. Highly ionized gas particles, called plasmas, can be converted to produce a single, powerful, split – second explosion that can cause powerful electron currents to fly off at supersonic speeds. The sight, which was detected as part of the scientists' work on the MMS mission, had enough resolution to reveal its differences from other reconnection regimes around the planet, such as the asymmetrical process observed in the magnetopause around the Earth, closer to the sun.

"This is important because the more we know and understand about these reconnects," said Torbert, "the more we can prepare for possible extreme events through reconnects around the Earth or elsewhere in the universe."

Magnetic reconnection also occurs on the sun and across the universe – in any case, driving the particles with force and causing much of the change observed in dynamic space environments – getting to know it around the Earth also helps us understand reconnection to other places in the universe. can not be reached by a spaceship. The more we understand the different types of magnetic reconnection, the more we can understand what these explosions might look like elsewhere.

For the first asymmetric event reported on October 16, 2015 and now this symmetrical event of July 11, 2017, NASA's MMS mission marked history by flying over magnetic reconnection events close to Earth. The four MMS spacecraft launched from a single rocket have only been a few seconds inside the events, but the instruments that the UNH researchers have helped to develop have been able to collect data at an unprecedented speed a hundred times faster than ever before. Thus, for the first time, scientists have been able to track the evolution of magnetic fields, the appearance of new electric fields, as well as the speed and direction of different charged particles.

Explore further:
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More information:
R.B. Torbert et al, Dynamics at the electronic scale of the scattering region during symmetrical magnetic reconnection in space, Science (2018). DOI: 10.1126 / science.aat2998