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Huge Blanket of Cold Plasma Discovered High Above The Earth

Although not much could be explained about this, but a great blanket of "cold plasma" - what the researchers consider as the clouds of charged particles have been discovered high above the Earth's surface. This coulds of old plasma - according cluster of European satellites and researchers - have been discovered in the top of the Earth's atmosphere reaching to approximately a quarter the sdistance between the Earth and the Moon. Researchers were considering that these charged particles that was hard to detect might have had influenced the incoming space weather. The greatest and most recent example of this is the solar flare resulting geomagnetic storm that happened in the early 2012. That was because the solar storms act as a strong barrier (with similar but high-speed charged particles) for the external space weather trying to come in to the Earth. It has been scientifically established that the Earth generates cold plasma (comparative low speed) - charged particles at the edge of its space, in the areas where sunlight strips electrons from gas atoms, leaving only their positively charged cores, or nuclei.


"It's like the weather forecast on TV. It's very complicated to make a reasonable forecast without the basic variables. Discovering this cold plasma is like saying, Oh gosh, there are oceans here that affect our weather," said space scientist Mats André, of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics. As a matter of fact, it has not yet been certainly established about how will be affect the Earth without the abundance of cold Plasma round the planet. Researchers already knew about the presence of cold plasma in the ionosphere above the Earth - approximately 100 kilometers above surface of our planet. Some scientists had clue about such clouds of charged particles between 20,000 and 100,000 kilometers above the Earth's surface.

Space scientists Chris Cully and Mats André believe that the plasma cloud have been already there, but the positive charge of spacecraft was failing to detect it. This has been supported by a very simple scientific explanation... The positive charge of spacecraft couldn't detect the cloud of positively charged particles because the spacecraft would repulse any cold plasma around it, due to the fact that two matching magnetic poles repulse each other.

In order to the find this, André and Cully got down to analyze the data collected from European Space Agency's Cluster II spacecraft - a group of 4 probes (satellites) each of which swings around Earth in a widely elliptical orbit. At the extreme peak of the orbit, each of these satellites reach almost halfway the distance to the moon. This huge distance traversed by the probe helped the scientists to research more effectively, thereby monitoring the magnetic field and electrical activities of our planet. The anomalies in the data gathered from Cluster II spacecraft gave clear indication of the presence of shockwaves from cold plasma - the clouds of charged particles existing around the satellites.

In this regard, Mats André considers that the time has arrived when researchers should start working on updating space-weather models by taking into consideration the cold plasma. The major concern in the present time is that nothing could be established about how the plasma will be influencing the solar storms, and this influence is "not a minor thing in space weather," considers André. He said, "it's an elephant in the room." This is doubtlessly a great research and has opened a new horizon for the researchers to come. The weather model of the Earth is now expected to be re-modeled. A lot of theories in Geophysics will now be revised. This research on cold-plasma has been approved for the mass publication in Geophysical Research Letters.

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