Earth may be trapped inside a giant magnetic tunnel–
“The magnetic ropes may surround our planet.“
The following written content by Ben Turner
The magnetic ropes may surround our planet.
Our planet, along with the rest of the solar system and some nearby stars, may be trapped inside a giant magnetic tunnel — and astronomers don’t know why.
A tube of vast magnetized tendrils, 1,000 light-years long and invisible to the naked eye, may encircle the solar system, astronomers propose in a new paper. Jennifer West, an astronomer at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, made the proposal after an investigation into the North Polar Spur and the Fan Region — two of the brightest radio-emitting gas structures in our galactic neighborhood — revealed that the two structures might be linked even though they are located on different sides of the sky.
“If we were to look up in the sky, we would see this tunnel-like structure in just about every direction we looked — that is, if we had eyes that could see radio light,” West said in a statement.
The curving tendrils — which are made of both charged particles and a magnetic field, and resemble long, thin ropes — project outward from the North Polar Spur and the Fan Region. Not only could the strange cosmic ropes link the two regions, but they could form something akin to “a curving tunnel” where the tendrils are like “the lines formed by the tunnel lights and road lane marker,” the researchers said.
This would place our solar system along with a small chunk of the Milky Way, inside the giant magnetic tunnel.
The North Polar Spur, which appears as an enormous yellow cloud stretching above the plane of our galaxy, is a gigantic crest of gas emitting X-rays and radio waves. The Fan Region is less understood but produces a lot of polarized radio waves. Though these unusual regions in space were discovered in the 1960s, scientific understanding of them remains patchy, and most previous studies described each structure separately.
But by plugging data from radio wave observations into a new computer model, West and her colleagues mapped out the probable length and position of the gigantic ropes. The model estimated that the ropes were roughly 1,000 light-years long and that the structures were most likely about 350 light-years from the solar system. Read more from Live Science.
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