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Spacecrafts witness a new facet of Earth's magnetic behaviourFive spacecraft from two ESA missions unexpectedly found themselves engulfed by waves of electrical and magnetic energy as they travelled through Earth’s night-time shadow on 5 August 2004... Shortly after 15:34 CEST, something set the tail of Earth’s natural cloak of magnetism oscillating... Whatever it was produced waves that travelled from the centre of the tail to its outer edges... All five spacecraft are designed to collect data on the magnetic bubble surrounding our planet, called the 'magnetosphere'. Earth’s magnetic field is generated deep inside the planet and rises into space where it constantly interacts with the solar wind, a perpetual stream of electrically charged particles released by the Sun. The stream pulls Earth’s magnetic field into a tail that stretches behind the planet for tens of thousands of kilometres. Gusts and storms in the solar wind are known as 'space weather' and can make Earth’s magnetic field quake.
by AUTHOR
March 30, 2006
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