Massive Plasma Tubes Confirmed in Upper Earth Atmosphere Magnetosphere

""Researchers led by an undergraduate student in Australia have developed a new way to map the Earth’s magnetosphere, confirming 60-year-old theories about the existence of massive plasma tubes in the upper atmosphere.

The discovery is the result of an honors project by Cleo Loi, a 23-year-old undergraduate at the University of Sydney, according to IFLScience. Loi realized she could use the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope to study regions of the upper atmosphere that are poorly understood, but are crucial in deflecting charged particleswhich originate both from the sun and cosmic rays.

Loi and her fellow researchers uncovered the existence of plasma structures situated in the upper regions of the magnetosphere. These plasma formations, which often take the shape of massive tubes, run parallel to the magnetic field and exist in low and high density variations. The plasma tubes also move over time, contributing to interference effects encountered by telescopes and satellites.

“We measured their position to be about 600 kilometers [373 miles] above the ground, in the upper ionosphere, and they appear to be continuing upwards into the plasmasphere. This is around where the neutral atmosphere ends, and we are transitioning to the plasma of outer space,” Loi observed.

“We saw a striking pattern in the sky where stripes of high-density plasma neatly alternated with stripes of low-density plasma. This pattern drifted slowly and aligned beautifully with the Earth’s magnetic field lines, like aurorae.”

Loi was able to develop an unusual and innovative use for the radio telescope array that was used in the study, splitting its 128 antennas into two halves in a process akin to using a pair of eyes. This allowed the researchers to visualize the plasma structures in real time, according to Io9, measuring the height, spacing, and angles of the tubes. Such a visualization of the plasma tubes, taking place in three dimensions, has never before been accomplished."" 

http://www.inquisitr.com/2140201/giant-plasma-tubes-confirmed-to-exist-in-earths-atmosphere/

Singing Stars May Be a Reality in the Universe

Scientists may have discovered the "sound" of stars by observing fluid in motion.

""A team of researchers observed the reaction of an ultra-intense laser with a plasma target, theUniversity of York reported. They noticed that a trillionth of a second after the laser strikes, plasma flowed from regions of high density to those of lower density. This event caused plasma to build up at the interface between high and low density areas, generating a sound wave.

The sound was of a frequency of more than a trillion hertz, which is six million times higher than what can be heard by any mammal.

"One of the few locations in nature where we believe this effect would occur is at the surface of stars. When they are accumulating new material stars could generate sound in a very similar manner to that which we observed in the laboratory - so the stars might be singing - but, since sound cannot propagate through the vacuum of space, no-one can hear them," said John Pasley, of the York Plasma Institute in the Department of Physics at York.

The technique used to observe this sound wave works similarly to a police speeding camera, allowing the researchers to analyze how the fluid moved when struck by the laser on a timescale of less than a trillionth of a second.

"It was initially hard to determine the origin of the acoustic signals, but our model produced results that compared [favorably] with the wavelength shifts observed in the experiment. This showed that we had discovered a new way of generating sound from fluid flows. Similar situations could occur in plasma flowing around stars," said Alex Robinson from the Plasma Physics Group at STFC's Central Laser Facility.""

http://www.hngn.com/articles/79515/20150323/stars-sing-a-song-but-its-too-high-for-even-bats-to-hear.htm

First Massive Solar Storm of 2015 Delivers Spectacular Auroras from Bursting Plasma Shoots of Sun

""A severe solar storm reached the Earth on Tuesday, contributing to a display of the aurora with the potential to stretch as far south as Oregon in the US, as well as being visible across unexpected reaches of the southern hemisphere.

Two blasts of magnetic plasma left the sun on Sunday, eventually combining and arriving on Earth on Tuesday about 15 hours earlier and much stronger than expected, said Thomas Berger, director of the Space Weather Prediction Centre in Boulder, Colorado. 

Authorities warned of possible disruption to power grids, GPS tracking and communication systems, but Berger said that in this case there were none of the bursts of radiation that can affect satellite operations.

The storm ranked a 4, called severe, on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s scale of 1-5 scale for geomagnetic effects. It is the strongest solar storm to reach Earth since the fall of 2013. It’s been nearly a decade since a level 5 storm, termed extreme, has hit Earth."" 

""Striking images came from Estonia and Alaska, while forecasters said there was the possibility of a sky show in much of Russia and northern Europe, as far south as central Germany and Poland.

In the southern hemisphere, displays were reported from Dunedin, New Zealand, and mainland Australian locations including Perth and Goulburn.""

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/mar/18/solar-storm-delivers-spectacular-aurora-displays-and-pictures

Exotic States of Matter Reveal Plasma Secrets Through Particle Jets at Cern

""When the LHC accelerator at the world's largest laboratory in CERN, Geneva, collided two lead ions travelling at nearly the speed of light, for a fraction of a second ordinary matter was transformed into the most exotic state of matter known to physics: quark-gluon plasma. Analysis of the streams of particles penetrating the plasma has led to new findings about the properties of the plasma, and was recently published in the journal Physical Review Letters by the international team of physicists working at the ATLAS detector.

Immediately following the Big Bang and the formation of space-time, the Universe was filled with matter of extraordinary properties. Quarks and gluons, today only found bound within protons and neutrons, bounced about freely, comprising a homogenous 'soup'. This exceptional state of matter, appearing only at temperatures of billions of degrees, has been recreated by physicists at the LHC accelerator by colliding heavy lead ions.

Study of the quark-gluon plasma poses an enormous challenge. It appears only rarely during collisions, in extremely minute quantities, and then only for a fraction of a second. It immediately begins to expand under its own pressure, rapidly cools and transforms itself into an avalanche of ordinary particles. Modern physics has no tools at its disposal to directly observe quarks and gluons. We cannot simply proceed with the usual methods of measurement, like inserting a thermometer into the plasma and waiting a few minutes for the results. Much more refined methods are needed.

"Fortunately detectors like the ATLAS detector have suceeded in recording the decay products of particles which have interacted in the quark-gluon plasma. By carefully analysing the properties of those particles, we can come to guarded conclusions about the features of the plasma," says Prof. Barbara Wosiek of the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków, Poland, who coordinated and approved the analysis of data gathered by the ATLAS detector in 2011. The analysis was performed by a team from Columbia University.

Most of the information we have on the quark-gluon soup is provided by particles that disperse sideways as the result of a collision. As they move in this specific direction, crosswise to the initial direction of flight of the lead nuclei, it makes it relatively easy to distinguish them from thousands of other particles and assures that they resulted from the early stage of the collision. If so, immediately after the collision they had to traverse through the quark-gluon cloud, to then collapse into a concentrated narrow stream of particles, known as jets.

"These initially produced particles lose energy while going through the hot, dense plasma soup, which leads to extinguishing the high-energy jets. Through our analysis we go about reconstructing jets of an extremely high energy level, reaching 400 gigaelectronvolts," adds Prof. Wosiek.

After gathering the data on the reconstructed jets in the collision of lead nuclei, the team of physicists can correlate and compare the results with those obtained from proton-proton collisions. The idea behind such a comparison is quite simple. From a precise enough theoretical consideration it is expected that quark-gluon plasma will not arise in a proton-proton collision. In turn, theoretical models of heavy ions in collision predict the formation of dense plasma in a head-on ion-ion collision of extremely high energy. Comparison of results from the data analysis of both types of collisions enables evaluation of how the jets are disturbed by the presence of plasma.""

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150311124649.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fspace_time%2Fbig_bang+%28Big+Bang+News+--+ScienceDaily%29