Scientists have found that the earth and the sun are tied together more closely than they would have believed:
Like giant, cosmic chutes between the Earth and sun, magnetic portals open up every eight minutes or so to connect our planet with its host star.
Once the portals open, loads of high-energy particles can travel the 93 million miles (150 million km) through the conduit during its brief opening, space scientists say.
Called a flux transfer event, or FTE, such cosmic connections not only exist but are possibly twice as common as anyone ever imagined, according to space scientists who attended the 2008 Plasma Workshop in Huntsville, Ala., last week.
“Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn’t exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible,” said David Sibeck, an astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
Not only are these links not continuous they vary:
“We used to think the connection was permanent and that solar wind could trickle into the near-Earth environment anytime the wind was active,” Sibeck said. “We were wrong. The connections are not steady at all. They are often brief, bursty and very dynamic.”
Several speakers at the workshop outlined the formation of a flux transfer event. One idea is that on the side of Earth facing the sun, our magnetic field presses against the sun’s magnetic field. And about every eight minutes, the two fields briefly reconnect, forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth.
No word in the article on whether the events are periodic, cyclical, or merely recurring.
Interestingly, FTE’s are believed to affect the polar ice caps:
The transient nature of reconnection lead to the proposal of an alternative model for flow stimulation which is termed the expanding/contracting polar cap boundary model. In this model, the addition to, or removal from, the polar cap of magnetic flux stimulates flow as the polar cap boundary seeks to return to an equilibrium position. The resulting average patterns of flow are therefore a summation of the addition of open flux to the polar cap at the dayside and the removal of flux from the polar cap in the nightside. This paper reviews progress over the last decade in our understanding of ionospheric convection that is driven by transient reconnection such as FTEs as well as by reconnection in the tail during substorms in the context of a simple model of the variation of open magnetic flux. In this model, the polar cap expands when the reconnection rate is higher at the dayside magnetopause than in the tail and contracts when the opposite is the case.
Oh, let’s not let the astrologers get hold of this. Because if it happens with Earth, it likely happens with other planets, and then it’s going to be a never-ending argument akin to “intelligent design.”