'It basically lifts the skies up.'

September 7, 2024 7:55 PM

NASA discovers Earth's electrical field at last after 60-year search
posted by sardonyx (20 comments total)

This is so beautiful I’m in tears. Thank you so much for posting. I have been so deeply disappointed by physics in my lifetime. With all of the understanding we’ve gained about the nature of quantum interactions over the last twenty years, it feels like the only applications have been slightly brighter screens and longer lasting batteries. Which like, okay, makes a certain sense from a utilitarian perspective.

Finally something that makes my heart sing.
posted by 1024 at 8:18 PM on September 7 [8 favorites]

Apparently this is my 100th comment and I would like to use it here to remember that life is beautiful and I love you all

Best of the web!
posted by 1024 at 8:41 PM on September 7 [36 favorites]

This is fascinating. I’m curious, I read the article and skimmed the paper that was linked therein, but was there just one launch and data collection, or has this been replicated? I have only a basic understanding of any of this so maybe they don’t need more than one rocket launch, but I guess I’m just wondering, why no comparison launches from other coordinates?

There’s some cool ramifications here about like, planetary formation. Are there more things that this discovery will influence on a humanistic scale, rather than a planetary one?
posted by Mizu at 10:03 PM on September 7

Nature article. Yes there’s a paywall.
posted by nat at 10:29 PM on September 7 [2 favorites]

I clicked the link from the article above and got no paywall. I think it’s a gift link? Here is where that link took me: nature paper
posted by Mizu at 10:44 PM on September 7 [1 favorite]

Ok that’s weird, for me there was a paywall. But now I click and it comes up! Cool.
posted by nat at 11:07 PM on September 7

"Paging Mr Tesla. Nikola Tesla to the white courtesy phone, please...."
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 11:57 PM on September 7 [3 favorites]

… and perhaps Philip Pullman also.
posted by rongorongo at 12:10 AM on September 8 [8 favorites]

Help me understand the implications: what would happen to our atmosphere if earth did not have this field? Does -or did -it have any effect on the creation of life here?

(and yes, this is a beautiful thing to discover)
posted by Silvery Fish at 5:16 AM on September 8

I had a lot of fun reading the reviewer comments in the "peer review file" so cool that these are public.
posted by mathiu at 5:22 AM on September 8 [3 favorites]

Help me understand the implications: what would happen to our atmosphere if earth did not have this field? Does -or did -it have any effect on the creation of life here?

ah... I just watched the video, and the answer is, "We don't know yet." Which is one of my favorite answers!
posted by Silvery Fish at 6:17 AM on September 8 [2 favorites]

Bravo NASA!
posted by doctornemo at 8:28 AM on September 8 [1 favorite]

"Svalbard is the only rocket range in the world where you can fly through the polar wind and make the measurements we needed," study co-author Suzie Imber, a space physicist at the University of Leicester in the U.K., said in the statement.

Wicked.
posted by eustatic at 9:03 AM on September 8 [1 favorite]

I too came away confused by the claim that this effect "holds the sky up."
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:40 AM on September 8 [1 favorite]

Super cool!
posted by ellieBOA at 1:09 PM on September 8

I read the scientist exclaiming that it "holds the sky up" as being one person totally using a poetical phrase to indicate total awesomeness of this discovery!
posted by BlueHorse at 3:00 PM on September 8

"holds the sky up" appears to refer to a layer of the atmosphere that sits higher up than it would if not for this force opposing gravity.
posted by straight at 4:56 PM on September 8 [1 favorite]

In general, the team found that the ambipolar field increases what’s known as the “scale height” of the ionosphere by 271%, meaning the ionosphere remains denser to greater heights than it would be without it.

From an article about this on the NASA website.
posted by straight at 5:00 PM on September 8 [2 favorites]

So awesome!
And thanks Mathiu for linking to the peer review file. What an incredibly thorough, poised, and well-written rebuttal to the reviewers. Great fun to read.
posted by nemutdero at 10:02 PM on September 8 [1 favorite]

I'm confused about the relationship between this field, which seems to have been measured entirely above the Karman line, versus the much stronger electric field in the troposphere that is associated with lightning strikes and insect electroperception of flowers and the like. Is the prediction that this ionospheric field has the same sign globally, which would mean that the entire Earth has a net static electric charge? Or is there some different process in the tropics, where the magnetic field lines are horizontal rather than vertical, so that the electric field in the tropical ionosphere points in the opposite direction, and Earth is electrically neutral? I have follow-up questions about both possibilities.

On my "weird science back burner" has been to understand why, in our current understanding, the lower atmosphere has a permanent electric field. This question got moved slightly towards the front burner when I read recently — in a source which I instantly lost track of, to my annoyance — that lightning strikes work to maintain this lower-atmosphere field, rather than discharging it. But if the mostly-conductive ionosphere has a net field, whether its direction is the same globally or not, then a nonzero field in the insulating layers of the atmosphere perhaps changes from a mystery to a clue in a different puzzle.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 4:17 AM on September 9 [1 favorite]