Hotter Then The Sun

A groundbreaking nuclear fusion rocket could slash the time it takes astronauts to travel to Mars in half.

Pulsar Fusion has started construction on what it claims is the largest practical nuclear fusion rocket engine ever built. The exhaust speeds from the new rocket could reach over 500,000 miles per hour.

“Humanity has a huge need for faster propulsion in our growing space economy, and fusion offers 1,000 times the power of the conventional ion thrusters currently used in orbit,” Richard Dinan, the CEO of Pulsar Fusion, said in a statement. 

“In short, if humans can achieve fusion for energy, then fusion propulsion in space is inevitable. We believe that fusion propulsion will be demonstrated in space decades before we can harness fusion for energy on Earth.”

The key to fusion power is building sustained heat. Pulsar Fusion’s new direct fusion drive (DFD) rocket engine will hopefully reach several hundred million degrees, creating temperatures hotter than the Sun.

Engineers are building the engine in a test facility in Bletchley, England. The fusion reactor generates energy, creating a plasma of electrically charged particles. Those energetic particles are converted to thrust using a rotating magnetic field.

But confining the super-hot plasma with an electromagnetic field is a huge challenge. To better understand the complex plasma, the company is using AI machine learning to study data from the PFRC-2 fusion reactor. 

The simulations will assess the performance of nuclear fusion plasma for propulsion as it exits a rocket engine emitting exhaust particles at hundreds of miles per second.  READ MORE...

A Dent In The Earth

There’s a pretty hefty dent in the Earth's magnetic field and it’s giving scientists cause for concern.

The Earth’s magnetic field is vital for protecting the planet from the Sun’s rays, but an area of weakness in the field has been detected which is making experts nervous.

The weak area is a region called the South Atlantic Anomaly and it’s been studied by NASA over recent years.

According to ScienceAlert, the area in the field between South America and Africa is being described as a “pothole in space”.

While the region doesn’t post an immediate threat to life, it could have a big impact on man-made structures in our orbit.

It means that spacecraft and satellites which stay in the Earth’s magnetic field as they orbit the planet could face technical difficulties as the protection from the sun’s rays is reduced. Exposure in this way could lead to critical damage in the long term.

"The magnetic field is actually a superposition of fields from many current sources," geophysicist Terry Sabaka from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre said back in 2020.

"The observed SAA can be also interpreted as a consequence of weakening dominance of the dipole field in the region," said fellow NASA Goddard geophysicist Weijia Kuang.

"More specifically, a localized field with reversed polarity grows strongly in the SAA region, thus making the field intensity very weak, weaker than that of the surrounding regions."

"Even though the SAA is slow-moving, it is going through some change in morphology, so it's also important that we keep observing it by having continued missions," said Sabaka.  READ MORE...

Surging Through Earth's Core

An illustration showing mysterious waves (red) moving across the 

outermost layer of Earth's outer core. 

(Image credit: Planetary Visions (credit: ESA/Planetary Visions))

Scientists have detected a completely new type of magnetic wave that surges through Earth's outer core every seven years, warping the strength of our planet's magnetic field in the process.

The waves — dubbed "Magneto-Coriolis" waves because they move along the Earth’s axis of rotation, per the Coriolis effect — creep from East to West in tall columns that can travel up to 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) per year, the researchers wrote in a March 21 paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using a fleet of European Space Agency (ESA) satellites, the team pinpointed the mysterious waves to the outermost layer of Earth's liquid outer core, right where that layer meets the rocky mantle — roughly 1,800 miles (2,900 km) below the planet's surface.

According to the researchers, the existence of these waves could help explain mysterious fluctuations in the planet's magnetic field, which is generated by the movement of liquid iron in the planet's outer core. Satellite measurements of the magnetic field taken over the last 20 years show that the field's strength dips every seven years or so, coinciding with the oscillations of these newfound waves.  READ MORE...

Magnetc Field Flip

The flipping of the planet's magnetic pole sounds like the plot of a disaster movie, but it seems to happen cyclically and at somewhat predictable intervals. In fact, for the past 20 million years or so, Earth’s magnetic field has flipped every 200,000 to 300,000 years —although it has been more than twice that long since the last one.

But what does this mean? Could the next geomagnetic reversal occur at any time? And if that is the case, should we be worried?

What is Earth’s magnetic field?
The Earth’s magnetic field is a magnetic field that originates in its core. The reason why Earth has a magnetic field is due to its solid iron core that is surrounded by an ocean of hot, liquid metal, which generates an electric current as it moves.

The molten, conductive fluid in the Earth is constantly moving. Earth’s core is extremely hot, over 9,000°F (5,000°C), even hotter than the outer layer of the Sun, and this heat drives convection currents in the outer core. The constant movement of the molten outer core around the solid iron inner core generates a magnetic field via the dynamo effect, which extends out into the space around the Earth.

The magnetic field shields the planet from the effects of the solar wind, and this is what allows life on Earth to exist.

The solar wind is full of charged particles, magnetic clouds, and radiation which would severely damage any life that might exist. Earth's magnetic field, or magnetosphere, serves as a shield, deflecting and redirecting the solar wind.

In fact, when the solar wind slams into the magnetosphere, it produces the aurora borealis, the northern and southern lights in the polar regions. When charged particles from the sun strike atoms in Earth’s atmosphere, electrons move to higher-energy orbits. When the electrons move back to a lower-energy orbit, it releases a particle of light or photon.  READ MORE...

Magnetic Fields Singing

Our planet’s magnetic field is “singing.” The European Space Agency just released a recording of the frequencies generated as a solar storm collided with Earth’s magnetic field. It was released alongside new findings published in Geophysical Research Letters this week.

What is it? Solar storms are the eruption of electrically charged particles ejected from the sun. When those particles reach Earth, they come into contact with the planet’s magnetic field. The first region of the magnetic field they hit is called the foreshock. The interactions of the particles with the foreshock causes the release of complex magnetic waves.

How was it recorded? ESA’s Cluster mission was able to record these magnetic waves as they scatter into higher frequencies. When scientists covert these frequencies into audible signals, the result is the ghostly sound that you can hear below. When there are no solar particles to contend with, these magnetic waves oscillate on a single frequency and so would convert into a very different, mellower “song.”

Cluster (technically Cluster II, as the first mission was lost in a launch failure) is a set of four spacecraft launched in 2000 and positioned out in Earth’s magnetosphere to study its interaction with solar wind. The spacecraft regularly venture out into the foreshock. The new findings and recordings were made from an analysis of data collected during six solar storm collisions observed from 2001 to 2005.

So what? Earth’s magnetic field is the planet’s primary line of defense against harmful solar activity that could knock out many orbital and terrestrial instruments and power grids. The authors of the latest study used computer simulations created by a model called Vlasiator to illustrate how changes in the foreshock affects how the energy generated by solar storm interactions propagates down to Earth.

As it turns out, the disturbances felt at the foreshock are much more complex than the research team anticipated, presenting another uncertainty that could affect how we forecast potential space weather threats. As usual, we need better data. Turns out these eerie recordings are less a novelty soundtrack and more an urgent alarm for us to do more to study these processes.