Hundreds of thousands of high-energy particles will travel through this gap until it shuts around the time you reach the bottom of the page.According to space physicist David Seebeck of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, it’s known as a “flux transfer event” or “FTE.” “I was convinced they didn’t exist in 1998, but the proof is now irrefutable.” Indeed, David Seebeck established their existence in 2008 at a plasma conference in Huntsville, Alabama, when he presented his findings to a worldwide gathering of space physicists.
NASA has established that these gateways between the Sun and the Earth occur every 8 minutes in the future.
For a long time, scientists have assumed that the Earth and the Sun are linked. High-energy particles from the Sun reach the Earth’s magnetosphere (the magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet) through the solar wind and pierce the planet’s magnetic shielding.
“We used to believe that this link was permanent, and that the solar wind might infiltrate into near-Earth space at any moment when it was active,” Seebeck adds. “We were mistaken. The linkages aren’t at all random, and they’re unaffected by flares or the rate at which solar particles move. Every 8 minutes, these gateways open.”
Scientists discussed how these gateways are created: The Earth’s magnetic field is pushed against the Sun’s magnetic field on the daylight side of the Earth (the side nearest to the Sun).
These two fields temporarily combine or “reunite” every eight minutes, producing a gateway through which particles can flow.
The portal is shaped like a magnetic cylinder that spans the Earth’s breadth. Four ESA Cluster spacecraft and five NASA THEMIS probes flew in and around these cylinders, measuring their diameters and registering particles that passed through.
“They do exist,” Seebeck adds. Scientists may use these observations to model portals in their computers and anticipate their behavior now that Cluster and THEMIS have physically examined gateways. At a presentation, University of New Hampshire space physicist Jimmy Rader presented one such concept.
He explained to his colleagues that cylindrical portals originate above the equator and subsequently transit through the Earth’s winter pole: The North Pole is where gateways linking the Sun and the Earth pass through each December. The portals that connect the Sun and the Earth cross over the South Pole in July.
“I believe there are two types of these portals: active and passive,” Seebeck says. Active portals are magnetic cylinders that allow particles to flow through relatively readily and are significant energy conductors for the Earth’s magnetosphere.
Passive portals are magnetic cylinders with a stronger resistance to particles and fields; their interior structure prevents such a light passage 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 computed the characteristics of passive FTEs and encouraged his colleagues to search the THEMIS and Cluster data for their indications.
“Passive FTEs may or may not be essential, but we won’t know for sure until we learn more about them.” Many questions remain unanswered: What causes portals to appear every 8 minutes? How do magnetic fields inside a cylinder twist and curl? “We’re giving it a lot of thought,” Seebeck adds.
Meanwhile, a new gateway is opening high over your head, linking our planet to the sun. Data reception and transmission?
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