During the time you are reading this article, something will happen high above your head, which many scientists did not believe until recently. According to NASA Science, a magnetic gateway will open between the Earth and the Sun at a distance of 150 million kilometers.
This space will be filled with thousands of high-energy particles until it closes about the time you reach the bottom of the page.
It’s known as a “flux transfer event,” or “FTE,” according to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s space physicist David Seebeck.
“In 1998, I was convinced they didn’t exist, but evidence now shows me incorrect.”
Indeed, David Seebeck proved their existence in 2008 and presented his results during a plasma lecture at an international meeting of space physicists in Huntsville, Alabama.
The Sun-Earth portals occur every 8 minutes, according to NASA. Scientists believe the Earth and the Sun have been linked for a long time. The solar wind carries high-energy particles from the Sun into the magnetosphere (the magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet), breaking the earth’s magnetic shielding.
“We used to think this relationship was permanent, and that the solar wind might permeate near-Earth space anytime it was active,” Seebeck continues.
“We were utterly wrong.” Flares and the pace at which solar particles move have no effect on the links, which aren’t random. These portals open every 8 minutes. Scientists spoke on how these portals came to be: On the dayside of the Earth, the magnetic field of the Earth is pushed against the magnetic field of the Sun (the side nearest to the Sun).
Every eight minutes, these two fields momentarily join or “reunite,” forming a portal through which particles can pass.
The gateway is fashioned like a magnetic cylinder that stretches the whole circumference of the Earth. Four ESA Cluster spacecraft and five NASA THEMIS probes measured the diameters of the cylinders and recorded the particles that went through them.
Seebeck asserts, “They are genuine.” Now that Cluster and THEMIS have observed gateways firsthand, scientists may utilize this data to model portals in their computers and predict their behavior.
Jimmy Rader, a space physicist at the University of New Hampshire, exhibited one of these models at a seminar.
Cylindrical portals form above the equator and traverse across the Earth’s winter pole, he explained to his colleagues:
In December, the Sun-Earth portals traverse across the North Pole. In July, the Sun’s and Earth’s portals intersect at the South Pole.
Seebeck believes there are two sorts of portals: active and passive. Active portals are magnetic cylinders that enable particles to flow freely through them and are important energy conductors in the magnetosphere.
Passive gateways’ internal construction inhibits such a light movement of particles and fields (Active FTEs are formed at equatorial latitudes when the IMF is directed to the south; passive FTEs are formed at higher latitudes when the IMF is directed to the north).
Seebeck has calculated the characteristics of passive FTEs and encourages his colleagues to look for them in the THEMIS and Cluster data.
“Passive FTEs might be substantial or not, but we won’t know for sure until we understand more about them.”
Numerous questions remain unsolved, including the following: What’s the deal with portals appearing every eight minutes?
How may magnetic fields twist and curl within a cylinder? “We’re discussing it,” Seebeck says.
Meanwhile, far above your head, a new portal connecting our planet to the sun is opening. What is the difference between receiving data and transmitting data?
