First-Ever Views of Elusive Energy Explosion in the Earth’s Magnetotail.

“This is important because the more we know and understand about these reconnections,” said Torbert, “the more we can prepare for extreme events that are possible from reconnections around the Earth or anywhere in the universe.”

Magnetic reconnection also happens on the sun and across the universe—in all cases forcefully shooting out particles and driving much of the change we see in dynamic space environments—so learning about it around Earth also helps us understand reconnection in other places in the universe which cannot be reached by spacecraft. The more we understand about different types of magnetic reconnection, the more we can piece together what such explosions might look like elsewhere.

For the first reported asymmetrical event on October 16, 2015, and now this symmetrical event on July 11, 2017, NASA’s MMS mission made history by flying through magnetic reconnection events near the Earth. The four MMS spacecrafts launched from a single rocket were only inside the events for a few seconds, but the instruments which UNH researchers helped to develop were able to gather data at an unprecedented speed of one hundred times faster than ever before. As a result, for the first time, scientists could track the way the magnetic fields changed, new electric fields presented, as well as the speeds and direction of the various charged particles.

This work was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.

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Contacts and sources:
Robbin Ray
University of New Hampshire

Citation: Electron-scale dynamics of the diffusion region during symmetric magnetic reconnection in space.
R. B. Torbert, J. L. Burch, T. D. Phan, M. Hesse, M. R. Argall, J. Shuster, R. E. Ergun, L. Alm, R. Nakamura, K. J. Genestreti, D. J. Gershman, W. R. Paterson, D. L. Turner, I. Cohen, B. L. Giles, C. J. Pollock, S. Wang, L.-J. Chen, J. E. Stawarz, J. P. Eastwood, K. J. Hwang, C. Farrugia, I. Dors, H. Vaith, C. Mouikis, A. Ardakani, B. H. Mauk, S. A. Fuselier, C. T. Russell, R. J. Strangeway, T. E. Moore, J. F. Drake, M. A. Shay, Yuri V. Khotyaintsev, P.-A. Lindqvist, W. Baumjohann, F. D. Wilder, N. Ahmadi, J. C. Dorelli, L. A. Avanov, M. Oka, D. N. Baker, J. F. Fennell, J. B. Blake, A. N. Jaynes, O. Le Contel, S. M. Petrinec, B. Lavraud, Y. Saito. Science, 2018; eaat2998 DOI: 10.1126/science.aat2998