Earth’s third energy field known as ‘Polar Wind’, which only existed in theory so far, has now been discovered by Nasa after 60 years.
According to the team of scientists, Polar winds have crucial answers about how Earth’s atmosphere evaporates rapidly above the north and south poles. They feel that this field of energy may have played a crucial role in the evolution of our atmosphere’s uppermost layer. This field is as important to our planet as gravity and the magnetic field.
Glyn Collinson, principal investigator of Endurance at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, in a video released by Nasa, said that this field is fundamental to understanding the way our planet works. According to Collinson, the field has been there since the beginning alongside the other two energy fields – gravity and magnetic. The scientists said that although the field is weak, it is significant to Earth as it counters gravity and lifts the skies up.
Back in the 1960s, several spacecraft that flew over the Earth’s poles had witnessed a stream of particles from the atmosphere flowing into space at supersonic speeds. Scientists were aware that sunlight caused particles to leak into space. Regardless, the detected particles did not show any signs that they were heated. Collinson said that there had to be something that was drawing these particles out of the atmosphere. However, back then, the technology that was needed to detect an energy field, which can only be sensed over hundreds of miles, was not available.
How did the scientists discover the field?
The team of scientists made the discovery based on the observation from a Nasa suborbital rocket which was able to measure this planet-wide electric field. The measurements given by Nasa’s Endurance Mission confirmed the existence of this ambipolar field. According to Nasa, the observations revealed that this energy field has been driving atmospheric escape and shaping the ionosphere – a layer of the upper atmosphere.
Collinson and his collaborators have been developing sensors for launch aboard the Endurance rocket mission since 2016. The team launched the suborbital rocket flight on May 11, 2022, from Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago. “Svalbard is the only rocket range in the world where one can fly through the polar wind and make the measurements we needed,” Suzie Imber, a space physicist at the University of Leicester, UK, and co-author of the paper, was quoted as saying by nasa.gov.
The Endurance mission revealed that hydrogen ions, which are in abundance in the polar wind, are pushed into space by an electric field that is 10.06 times stronger than gravity. The study also showed that the ambipolar field increases the ionosphere’s density by 271 per cent, essentially keeping it denser at greater heights.
According to Collinson, the field acts like a conveyor belt which lifts the atmospheric particles into space. This new discovery opens new avenues for exploration, especially how energy fields on various planets with atmospheres such as Venus and MArs have influenced the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere.
