Hidden Portals in Earth's Magnetic Field | Hacker News Reader

Hidden Portals in Earth's Magnetic Field

nasa.gov

112 pointsespeed30 comments

"Cave Johnson here. I think we found something that will help us stick it to those blowhards at Black Mesa. Turns out there's a natural portal phenomenon connecting the magnetic fields of the earth and the sun. The lab boys are still trying to figure out the properties of this thing, see how it can be exploited for science, so we need volunteers. All test subjects who want to go on an all-expense-paid trip to the surface of the sun please meet in Testing Annex 5B and await further instructions. There's $60 in it for you if you make it back alive!"

> " All test subjects who want to go on an all-expense-paid trip to the surface of the sun please meet in Testing Annex 5B and await further instructions. There's $60 in it for you if you make it back alive!"

And don't worry, it's winter so the sun's not very hot right now.

> And don't worry, it's winter so the sun's not very hot right now.

We'll also be going at night, so bring flashlights.

"A favorite theme of science fiction is "the portal"--an extraordinary opening in space or time that connects travelers to distant realms. A good portal is a shortcut, a guide, a door into the unknown. If only they actually existed.... It turns out that they do, sort of,..."

Yes, if by "sort of", you mean, "not at all like how science fiction uses the term". What a terrible opening.

This was a weirdly written article. Scientists have known for a long time that the Earth's magnetic field connects with the Sun's, and that along those connected paths stream a lot of ejected Sun material in the form of plasma. To call that a portal seems like a bizarre attempt at exciting public interest. The big discovery here, that was done by Scudder, was to have found places where that magnetic field connects with the Earth's magnetic field, called reconnection points. The other discovery was they appear transient, and to me was not surprising.

> To call that a portal seems like a bizarre attempt at exciting public interest.

This wouldn't be weird if it were some crap news source, but it's kind of surprising that it's coming from NASA.

Since writers are journalism majors, not science majors and the pr hierarchy is distinct from the research hierarchy.

They dub it as 'the portal' but it seems that there is just a really long, 93million miles-long, magnetic field that connects the magnetic field of Earth and Sun. So I assume that it doesn't mean that we can 'throw stuff' at one end and expect it to come instantly over to the other end?

Can someone explain is there an application where we could utilize this discovery?

It sounds like the Interplanetary Transport Network, but with magnetic force instead of gravity. Maybe we can manipulate magnetic fields to move things through it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Netwo...

I'd surmise that a miniature probe could get a free trajectory to the Sun by taking advantage of this. Not sure how low a mass it would have to be though.

If this force was non-trivial we'd see it when we send out spacecraft or it would affect things in orbit.

My gut feeling is that a theoretical probe that could use this would have to weigh so little that it wouldn't be worth creating or its size would greatly limit what it could do.

Why miniature? Hook into the MFLs with some big coils and you can drag pretty much anything through the field. The sun's magnetic field is immensely powerful compared to anything we're familiar with on earth.

The solar wind is a few nT, while Earth's field is tens of uT. You're not going to be moving anything with that.

Not talking solar wind in terms of photon pressure, talking magnetic flux coupling.

This phenomena between the Earth and the Sun reminds me of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4867577. Is it possible that what Voyager 1 is currently encountering is an interaction between the Solar and the Galactic magnetic fields that resembles this Earth-Sun phenomena?

I'd never really thought about the existence of a galactic magnetic field. But when I think about it, why wouldn't it happen?

Tons of energetic particles can flow through the openings, heating Earth's upper atmosphere, sparking geomagnetic storms, and igniting bright polar auroras.

This is obviously a very direct link between our star's 11-year cycle and our planet's weather. What else is caused by this flow of energetic material? Could this be the source of the stray electrons or cosmic rays that seed clouds in our atmosphere?

Well one of the key topics of climate modelling has been trying to predict energy transfer from the Sun to the Earth. Generally we talk about CO2 and the greenhouse effect but lately there have a number of experiments that have shown that somehow the solar wind can also have a large impact. These points where the alignment of the magnetic fields allow the solar wind to shoot directly into the Earth's atmosphere provides another piece to the puzzle.

Well, the solar wind is really a stream of electrons and positive ions. Charges of opposite sign moving in relation to each other are more commonly known as an electric current. Electric current generates heat and a magnetic field.

It seems to me that the "portals" as they call them are just places where the insulation of the earth's upper atmosphere breaks down and begins to conduct a current. It becomes ionized, a plasma. The fact that these "portals" would then sometimes appear and disappear should then be obvious and predictable to anyone who has ever watched one of those novelty plasma globes.

They would also know that it's pretty much impossible to predict, though.

One of the interesting side effects of plasma streams impacting the atmosphere is that they transfer kinetic energy. Early models of the climate (I've not checked the most recent one the IPCC is endorsing) were strictly radiation based (how much energy is absorbed by atmosphere, ground, how much is reflected, and re-radiated off) generally kinetic effects were considered minor or immaterial because the magnetic field deflects most of the solar wind. So when a CME heads our way, the "mass" gets pushed aside by magnetic repulsion and the energy transfer is minimal (some angular velocity imparted to the planet). But if the mass is not moved aside and impacts the atmosphere directly, it transfers its kinetic energy to the atmospheric gas which comes back as a net rise in temperature.

If the effect is significant it could inform observations on solar activity and climate that were previously missing a plausible theory for connecting them. These 'portals' have the nice property that you can map them with a satellite and you can then correlate those maps with atmospheric effects. That should help us with the models we're using.

That makes sense. Because the broadside shove impacts the atmosphere with a relatively smooth voltage gradient if the solar wind is fairly even, then the atmosphere may not break down and conduct, and the resulting e field differential will impart kinetic energy into the molecules of the upper atmosphere. This energy has to go somewhere, so it just turns into random turbulence in the air until all the energy that was supplied is consumed.

But surely lightning strikes must also cause heating? Electric arc discharges on the order of gigajoules and milliseconds [1] works out to a lot of watts. I guess it averages out though because the amount of timespace with no-lightning-strike is much greater than that with lightning-strike.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning#Harvesting_lightning_...

So these "portals" are the connections being made between the two fields when the magnetic differential between them is great enough? Like lightning strikes? So very cool!

Hmm. That is a very interesting analogy. Thanks!

There are a lot of videos here: http://www.youtube.com/user/ScienceAtNASA

Old news http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92rYjlxqypM #ingress

Similar energies exist between people as well..

Humans don't have enough protons and electrons to generate magnetic fields of that many microTeslas...

I don't know where on the spectrum the energy would be, nor how strong it would need to be.

Though this is cool, I'm not entirely sure what this is good for. How will we use these portals?

I have no idea what I just read but it sounded facinating

This... is very, very similar to this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/04/voyager_one_arrives_...

Same phenomenon. Different scales. And evidently two research groups at NASA who don't talk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com