Changing Magnetic Fields of the Solar System
The red planet of Mars lacks a magnetic field that surrounds their planet to protect it from the incoming solar wind. In 1989, the Phobos probe of the Soviet Union made direct measurements of Mars’s atmospheric erosion. When the probe passed through the weak of the solar wind behind the red planet, onboard instruments detected ions that had been cleaned from its atmosphere, flowing downstream along with the solar wind. That has allowed scientists to surmise that solar wind erosion accounted for most of the lost atmosphere of Mars.
Other planets, in addition to Mars, are also influenced by the magnetic fields of time. In 2001, the Sun’s magnetic field magnetic north pole had flipped from north to south, according to NASA scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Its next reversal will not be until the year 2012, when the south magnetic pole will be reversed to the north. This reversal transition seems to happen when the Sun has its peaking time, during its 11-year sunspot cycle.
And then our own planet Earth has them also, but with less regular flips, with NASA scientists feeling one has begun within the past 300 years due to the weakening of the field lately. The magnetic field of both the Sun and Earth have similar oval shapes of their solar and terrestrial magnetic fields, even though the fields behave differently. The magnetic field of Earth is 100 times weaker than that of the Sun, with the magnetic field of the Sun enveloping the entire solar system in a bubble called the “heliosphere.”
Recently, it has been found that magnetic field reversals on the Sun were found to be closely linked to the varying number of the Sun’s sunspots. The magnetic cycle of the sun impacts the Earth’s climate, and is thought to have caused the Ice Age of the 1600s. The Tau Bootis, in the constellation Bootes, a star which has a mass about 3.87 times of Jupiter’s, is in the process of flipping its magnetic field–found by an international team led by Jean-Francois Donati and Claire Moutou of France when they were mapping the magnetic field of stars.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
