| Manu | Date: Friday, 05-March-2021, 10:36 AM | Message # 1 |
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| or The First Time, A 'Space Hurricane' Has Been Detected Over The North Pole
MICHELLE STARR3 MARCH 2021
For the first time, a hurricane has been detected in Earth's upper atmosphere. In 2014, satellites recorded a huge flowing swirl of plasma extending high into the magnetosphere that lasted for hours before dispersing.
Although we've never seen anything like this before, its detection suggests that space hurricanes, as they are known, could be a common planetary phenomenon.
"Until now, it was uncertain that space plasma hurricanes even existed, so to prove this with such a striking observation is incredible," said space environment physicist Mike Lockwood of the University of Reading in the UK.
Hurricanes in Earth's lower atmosphere are common: powerful, rotating weather systems around a relatively calm centre, accompanied by strong winds and lashing rain that can cause vast amounts of damage in a very short time.
They're not uncommon on other bodies, either: Jupiter and Saturn, in particular, are extremely turbulent places, not to mention roiling plasma tornadoes deep in the atmosphere of the Sun.
Space hurricanes, the new work reveals, are not dissimilar to their lower atmosphere cousins.
The detections were made on 20 August 2014, and revealed during a retrospective analysis led by Shandong University in China. According to the data, the hurricane appeared over the North Pole, extending to a diameter of 1,000 kilometres (621 miles).
It reached from 110 kilometres to 860 kilometres in altitude, and consisted of plasma with multiple spiral arms, swirling in an anticlockwise direction at speeds up to 2,100 metres per second (6,900 feet per second). The centre, however, was almost still, just like in hurricanes at lower altitudes.
Read more/full article/source - https://www.sciencealert.com/for-the....n-space
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