The researchers of the University of Reading discovered the first space hurricane. Thanks to the satellites they identifies a whirlwind, that was then identified as ionized gas and plasma. A new phenomena to discover.
What’s an hurricane?
It’s better know as tropical storm, a hurricane usually happens between summer and autumn in an area of the Northern Atlantic Ocean between the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.
Obviusly there are many kind of them. Some of them, for example, are born in the Pacific, at the easth of the line of the date change. If they born at west of the line and in the rest of the Pacific Ocean, in the Indian Ocean and in the Chinese Sea the tropical storms takes the name of typhoon.
They are usually born from low pression areas over the oceans, in an area already pertubed where the water temperature must be higher than 26°. This condition allows infact the elevation of huge masses of hot water, catalyzed by the Sun that heat the sea water, by making it boil.
The water vapor condenses at high altitude into storm clouds. The air goes down and it starts to generate winds ever stronger by interacting with the hot water that is going up.
Because of the Earth’s rotation and of the gravity, in the storm system is generated a whirlwind structure, that “eats” energy thanks to the hot water.
The hurricane technically borns when the winds of the storm reach the 118 kilometers per hour. Today, the same phenomena was recorded with different materials. It was so born the first space hurrican based on ions.
The space hurrican in the North Pole
This new scientifical phenomena was recorded over the North Pole.
The researchers of the University of Reading in England took back the datas collected in the 2014 by the team of the Chinese University of Shandong which used specific satelittes to identify the phenomena and that discovered the first space hurricane.
The scientists rebuilt a 3D image of this natural event. So they discovered that the whirlwind involved wasn’t created by the water, but by the air and ionized gas and plasma.
A real space hurricane with a mass of 600 miles of width (about 965 km) which is – rightly – over the North Pole.
It’s raining electrons
From the studied mass were raining electrons unlike the normal water of a terrestrial hurricane. This mass stood almost eight hours before to break down.
After the discovery, the professor Mike Lockwood, at the head of the study, claimed that until now no one never saw a space hurricane made of plasma and magnetic fields. These elements were available in the space only individually, but they never joined by creating a such strange phenomena, which migh become more common.
When did this space hurricane occure?
It seems that, this event occured in a period of low geomagnetic activity. Which means that the space hurricane acts like a terrestrial hurricane and it has even its structure.
It’s structured with a quite central area, spiral arms and a spreaded circulation.
According to the scientists, it’s probable that this kind of hurricane will bring to space meteorological effects like interferences in the high frequence radio communications or maybe to interferences in the sat nav and in the communication systems.
The space hurricane is amazing because the interaction between the atmosphere and the particles charged that arrive from the Space literally creates a rain of electrons, by producing bright auroras in the sky.
What’s changing?
The one described might be the classic conditions for the creation of a “banal” northern light. But there is something else that creates the shape of a hurricane of the atmospheric plasma.
According to the researchers, the main cause is the “interplanetary magnetic connection”. It’s one of the most complex mechanism of the Plasma physic where the energy of a magnetic field is converted into a kinetics and thermal energy.
The scientists now are conscious that these phenomenas can occure even when the sun activity isn’t very intense. For this reason they wonder northern lights and hurricanes even during the quitest phases of the Sun.
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