Auroras are faintly present throughout the night in the polar regions, but sometimes these lights flare up in spectacular brightnesses, and for years scientists have analyzed what triggers the formation of auroral substorms and sudden bursts of brightness. Now, a team of Japanese scientists has unlocked the mystery behind this spectacle, knocking down existing theories about the mechanism behind this spectacle, Europa Press reports.
The Kyoto-Kyushu research team explains that hot charged particles, or plasmas, gather in near-Earth space -- just above the upper atmosphere of the polar region -- when magnetic field lines are turned around. connect in space, causing the plasma to rotate, creating a sudden electrical current above the polar regions.
On the other hand, an electrical current flows near bright auroras in the upper atmosphere, so the plasma spins and discharges electricity, generating the "surge," the very bright sparks of light that characterize substorms. "This is not like anything space physicists have in mind," says study author Yusuke Ebihara of Kyoto University.
Ebihara bases the study, the conclusions of which are detailed in an article published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, on a supercomputer simulation program developed by Takashi Tanaka, a professor emeritus at Kyushu University in Japan.
Auroras originate from the sun's plasma, known as the solar wind. In the 1970s, scientists discovered that when this plasma approaches Earth along with magnetic fields, it triggers a change in Earth's magnetic field lines on the day side and then on the night side, but this Information alone could not explain how those flickering lights emerge in the sky.
Scientists had come up with theories for separate parts of the process, some suggesting that the acceleration of the plasma by the reconnection of magnetic field lines causes the aurora to break. Other experts argued that electrical current operation near Earth diverts a portion of the electrical current into the ionosphere for some unknown reason, causing these bright bursts of light, a theory that was widely accepted because it offered an explanation for why the Flowing updrafts were surging out of our planet.
But the puzzle pieces don't quite fit together, but Tanaka's supercomputer simulation program offers a logical explanation from start to finish. "Previous theories tried to explain individual mechanisms such as the reconnection of magnetic field lines and the deflection of electric currents, but there were contradictions when trying to explain the phenomena as a whole," Ebihara says.
"What we needed all the time was to look at the bigger picture," he adds. His work builds on previous research by both experts on how bursts emerge and explores the following processes, that is, how the rupture process expandson a large scale. The research also has the potential to alleviate dangerous problems associated with aurora breaks that can seriously disrupt satellites and power grids.
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