NASA Flies Satellites Through Explosion in Space—and Starts to Unravel Mystery of Magnetism

There’s a lot we don’t know about many of the magnetic effects we see throughout the universe.

Four identical NASA spacecraft fly near the sun-facing boundary of Earth’s magnetic field (the blue wavy lines). NASA

There’s a lot we don’t know about many of the magnetic effects we see throughout the universe. The familiar, beautiful northern lights, for example, are actually a bit of an enigma. They are driven by a mysterious magnetic process in which a huge amount of energy is explosively released when particles from the sun hit the Earth’s magnetosphere. This is so powerful it can even break down the Earth’s magnetic shield that normally protects us from harmful, charged particles.

Exactly how this fundamental process works has long been a puzzle to physicists. Now a new study published in Science has finally made a breakthrough by analyzing data from a NASA mission flying through a region of space where these explosions occur. The findings boost our understanding of phenomena ranging from faraway astrophysical events to local space weather and nuclear fusion.

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