Feeding on Magnetic Whirlpools
Enormous, 40,000-kilometer-wide swirls of electrically charged gas are feeding the Earth's magnetosphere, according to researchers who spied the swirls using the European Space Agency's Cluster quartet of spacecraft.
Enormous, 40,000-kilometer-wide swirls of electrically charged gas are feeding the Earth's magnetosphere, according to researchers who spied the swirls using the European Space Agency's Cluster quartet of spacecraft. Magnetic field lines from the Earth and Sun seem to be snapping together in these vortices [middle left], which thereby inject electrified gas, or plasma, into the Earth's magnetosphere. The result appeared in the October 20 issue of Annales Geophysicae.
