Plasma Tubes Discovered in Inner Layers of Earth's Magnetosphere with 3D Vision (VIDEO)

First Posted: Jun 02, 2015 12:05 PM EDT

Scientists may have discovered something interesting around planet Earth: tubular plasma structures in the inner layers of our planet's magnetosphere. The new findings come after the researchers creatively used a radio telescope to see in 3D.

"For over 60 years, scientists believed these structures existed but by imaging them for the first time, we've provided visual evidence that they are really there," said Cleo Loi, one of the researchers, in a news release. "The discovery of the structures is important because they cause unwanted signal distortions that could, as one example, affect our civilian and military satellite-based navigation systems. So we need to understand them."

The region of space around Earth occupied by its magnetic field, called the magnetosphere, is filled with plasma. This plasma is created by the atmosphere being ionized by sunlight.

The innermost layer of the magnetosphere is the ionosphere, and above that is the plasmasphere. Both are embedded with a variety of plasma structures including the newly detailed tubes.

The researchers measured the position of the tubes to be about 600 kilometers above the ground, in the upper ionosphere. These tubes appear to continue upward into the plasmasphere, which is around where the neutral atmosphere ends.

The findings come after the researchers used the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), a radio telescope located in the Western Australian desert. This instrument consists of 128 antenna "tiles" spread over an area roughly three by three kilometers.

"We saw a striking pattern in the sky where stripes of high-density plasma neatly alternated with stripes of low-density plasma," said Loi. "This pattern drifted slowly and aligned beautifully with the Earth's magnetic field lines, like aurorae. We realized we may be onto something big and things got even better when we invented a new way of using the MWA."

In this case, the researchers separated the signals from tiles in the east from the ones in the west. This gave the MWA the power to see in 3D.

The findings reveal a bit more about these structures and show how instruments can be used in a new way.

The findings are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Want to learn more? Check out the video below, courtesy of YouTube.