NASA is
planning to launch a mission called the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission
to study the portals that connect the Earth and the sun.
The mission will launch in 2014 and consists of four
identical satellites that will orbit in Earth’s magnetosphere where they will
surround the portals and observe how they work.
The
portals that connect the Earth and sun create an uninterrupted path between the
two.
They are
invisible and will open and close without warning. Some portals are short-lived
while others are vast and sustained, according to NASA..
"It's
called a flux transfer event or 'FTE,'" says space physicist David Sibeck
of the Goddard Space Flight Center.
"Ten
years ago I was pretty sure they didn't exist, but now the evidence is
incontrovertible."
Indeed,
today Sibeck is telling an international assembly of space physicists at the
2008 Plasma Workshop in Huntsville, Alabama, that FTEs are not just common, but
possibly twice as common as anyone had ever imagined.
Researchers
have long known that the Earth and sun must be connected. Earth's magnetosphere
(the magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet) is filled with particles from
the sun that arrive via the solar wind and penetrate the planet's magnetic
defenses.
They
enter by following magnetic field lines that can be traced from terra firma all
the way back to the sun's atmosphere.
"We
used to think the connection was permanent and that solar wind could trickle
into the near-Earth environment anytime the wind was active," says Sibeck.
"We
were wrong, the connections are not steady at all, they are often brief, bursty
and very dynamic."
Several
speakers at the Workshop have outlined how FTEs form: On the dayside of Earth
(the side closest to the sun), Earth's magnetic field presses against the sun's
magnetic field.
Approximately
every eight minutes, the two fields briefly merge or "reconnect,"
forming a portal through which particles can flow.
The
portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth.
The
European Space Agency's fleet of four Cluster spacecraft and NASA's five THEMIS
probes have flown through and surrounded these cylinders, measuring their
dimensions and sensing the particles that shoot through. "They're
real," says Sibeck.
Now that
Cluster and THEMIS have directly sampled FTEs, theorists can use those
measurements to simulate FTEs in their computers and predict how they might
behave.
Space
physicist Jimmy Raeder of the University of New Hampshire presented one such
simulation at the Workshop.
He told
his colleagues that the cylindrical portals tend to form above Earth's equator
and then roll over Earth's winter pole. In December, FTEs roll over the north
pole; in July they roll over the south pole.
Sibeck
believes this is happening twice as often as previously thought.
"I
think there are two varieties of FTEs: active and passive."
Active
FTEs are magnetic cylinders that allow particles to flow through rather easily;
they are important conduits of energy for Earth's magnetosphere.
Passive
FTEs are magnetic cylinders that offer more resistance; their internal
structure does not admit such an easy flow of particles and fields.
Sibeck
has calculated the properties of passive FTEs and he is encouraging his
colleagues to hunt for signs of them in data from THEMIS and Cluster.
"Passive
FTEs may not be very important, but until we know more about them we can't be
sure."
There
are many unanswered questions: Why do the portals form every 8 minutes?
How do
magnetic fields inside the cylinder twist and coil?
"We're
doing some heavy thinking about this at the Workshop," says Sibeck.
http://www.alien-disclosure-group.com/#/hidden-portals-in-space/4581508022
