Studying Earth's Magnetosphere

A new 3D supercomputer model presents a new theory of how magnetic reconnection works in high-temperature plasmas. This Los Alamos National Laboratory research supports an upcoming NASA mission to study Earth's magnetosphere in greater detail than ever.

Transcript

00:00:06 the earth is constantly bombarded with energy from the Sun without it the earth would die in addition to sunlight charged particles ejected from the Sun continually stream outward to form the solar wind during intense solar flares highly energetic particles are emitted which can be deadly fortunately the earth has something called a magnetosphere that protects us and the

00:00:31 charged particles are forced to flow around the earth because of this and it sets up a kind of a magnetic bubble for our planet that acts as a protective shield against the highest energy particles so understanding how the magnetosphere works is a very important and not well understood los alamos national laboratory scientists have now created a 3d model of the very basic

00:00:56 mechanisms of something called magnetic reconnection happening out at the leading edge of the magnetosphere at a place called that magneto pause and at the magnetopause there's a rapid rotation of the magnetic field corresponding to a current sheet a thin layer of current and this is where people believe that this process of magnetic reconnection is triggered so

00:01:20 what we're looking at in these movies is a simulation box that's centered around one of these thin boundary layers in order to look at the kinetic structure of these layers as they break out these models will help support a 2014 NASA Space Flight called the magnetospheric multiscale mission or mms that will study the physics of the magnetosphere in detail the spacecraft off on the mms

00:01:49 mission will have four spacecraft that are flying together pretty closely and have very high time resolution Diagnostics measuring the electric fields the magnetic fields and then the plasma particles the electron distribution functions within the plasma so we're pretty excited that after mms is launched we think that detailed of comparisons will be passed

00:02:13 between our kinetic simulations and the data from the mms mission I'm Kevin Rourke for lenell TV