A 40-year-old enigma about ghostly magnetic fields in interplanetary space may have finally been solved by new data from a constellation of 12 satellites in near-Earth space.
New research in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters finds that fine dust from pulverized space rocks is riding the solar wind past the spacecraft, which detected the cloud of fine debris as a temporary change in the local magnetic field.
If the discovery is correct, it points to a new way to study the little-understood intersection between the realms of the very big things in our solar system—like asteroids and planets—and the very smallest particles. Among other things, it could help explain how the Sun and other stars clean their interplanetary households.
“This event is important not only because it has been observed by so many satellites on one occasion, but also because it has been traced from the interplanetary space to the terrestrial magnetosheath,” explained planetary scientist Hairong Lai of Sun Yat‐Sen University, Zhuhai, China, who is the lead author of the new paper. The magnetosheath is the piled up solar wind created behind the bow shock, the region where the wind encounters the Earth’s magnetic field. Seeing the magnetic event in both space environments put their dust model to the test.
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