Earth's Magnetosphere

A simple visualization of Earth's magnetosphere near the time of the equinox. Earth's magnetic field creates a 'bubble' around Earth that helps protect our planet from some of the more harmful effects of energetic particles streaming out from the sun in the solar wind. Some of the earliest hints of this interaction go back to the 1850s with the work of Richard Carrington, and in the early 1900s with the work of Kristian Birkeland and Carl Stormer. That this field might form a type of 'bubble' around Earth was hypothesized by Sidney Chapman and Vincent Ferraro in the 1930s. The term 'magnetosphere' was applied to magnetic bubble by Thomas Gold in 1959. But it wasn't until the Space Age, when we sent the first probes to other planets, that we found clear evidence of their magnetic fields (though there were hints of a magnetic field for Jupiter in the 1950s, due to observations from radio telescopes).

In this series of visualizations, we present simplified models of these planetary magnetospheres, designed to illustrate their scale, and basic features of their structure and impacts of the magnetic axes offset from the planetary rotation axes.

For this Earth visualization, note that the north magnetic pole points out of the southern hemisphere.

For these visualizations, the magnetic field structure is represented by gold/copper lines. The semi-transparent grey mesh in the distance represents the boundary of the magnetosphere. Major satellites of the planetary system are also included.

The models are constructed by combining the fields of a simple magnetic dipole and a current sheet (whose intensity is tuned match the scale of the magnetotail). This is a variation of the simple Luhmann-Friesen magnetosphere model. They are meant to be representative of the basic characteristics of the planetary magnetic fields. Some features NOT included are longitudes of magnetic poles to a standard planetary coordinate system and offsets of the dipole center from the planetary center.
Released Friday, July 27th, 2018 This video is public domain and along with other supporting visualizations can be downloaded from the Scientific Visualization Studio at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13425 Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio/Tom Bridgman If you liked this video, subscribe to the NASA Goddard YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/NASAExplorer Follow NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center • Instagram http://www.instagram.com/nasagoddard • Twitter http://twitter.com/NASAGoddard • Twitter http://twitter.com/NASAGoddardPix • Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/NASA.GSFC • Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc