Ever since Isaac Newton was hit by an apple in 1666, scientists have been trying to understand the forces that shape our planet.
While Earth’s gravity and magnetic fields should be fairly well known, scientists now say they have discovered a third field that is “just as fundamental.”
NASA researchers have found the first evidence of a subtle, nearly imperceptible electric field around the planet.
This “ambipolar electric field” could be responsible for the mysterious winds of supersonic particles that continually shoot out from Earth’s poles.
In fact, the researchers claim the discovery could even explain why life originated here on Earth and nowhere else.
NASA researchers have discovered a hidden energy field around our planet that is ‘as important as gravity’
The field was discovered by the launch of the Endurance rocket (pictured) from the remote island of Spitsbergen
In the 1960s, when the first spacecraft were launched into orbit around the Earth, space agencies began noticing strange phenomena over the poles.
As the spaceships flew overhead, they were suddenly hit by a supersonic wind of charged particles shooting out of the atmosphere.
Although scientists have known about these “polar winds” for more than 50 years, no one has yet been able to explain what causes them.
Some particles may simply be heated by unfiltered sunlight and escape as steam from a boiling pot.
Other discoveries, however, were more mysterious. For example, scientists discovered a constant stream of hydrogen ions that were completely cool, despite traveling at supersonic speeds.
Principal investigator Dr. Glyn Collinson of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said: “There must have been something that was pulling these particles out of the atmosphere.”
Since the 1960s, scientists have known that streams of particles leave the atmosphere through the poles, but only now have they had the technology (see image) to detect the ambipolar electric field responsible for this.
Researchers hypothesized that the particles might be pulled out of the atmosphere by a global electrical charge, somewhere about 250 kilometers above the surface.
At this altitude, the atoms in our atmosphere begin to break apart into negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions.
Because the ions are 1,836 times heavier than electrons, they should sink to Earth under the influence of gravity.
But because they have opposite charges, the electrons and ions are held together by an electric field that pulls in both directions – hence the name ambipolar.
Like a dog pulling on a leash, the electrons pull their ions upward, against gravity, lifting them out of the atmosphere.
Until recently, however, there was no technology to measure this field.
During the 322-mile (518-km) distance traveled (pictured left), the rocket detected an electrical potential difference of only half a volt. Although weak, this is exactly what scientists had predicted
In 2016, researchers began developing a rocket that could measure what they believe is a very small voltage difference over hundreds of kilometers.
The highlight of this was NASA’s Endurance Mission, which launched from the remote Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, just a few hundred kilometers south of the North Pole.
The researchers had to travel to this remote island because it is the only place in the world where it is possible to detect the ambipolar electric field.
Around the poles, the Earth’s magnetic field produces “open field lines” that shoot out into space instead of forming closed loops.
Co-author Professor Suzanne Imber, a space physicist at the University of Leicester in the UK, told MailOnline: ‘The field is generated by electrons, which have a certain thermal pressure that allows them to rise to greater heights along open field lines.
The rocket had to be launched from the island of Spitsbergen (pictured), which is close to the North Pole, because it has the only rocket launch station far enough north to detect the field.
‘The electrons are bound to the magnetic field, so this is only observable above the poles, because the field lines run from the surface to space at high magnetic latitudes.’
This was made even more challenging by the fact that these field lines do not stay in the same place, but are constantly moving.
“It’s a real disaster if you get it wrong and launch your rocket at the wrong time. You only get one chance to do the experiment,” Professor Imber said.
Despite shifting field lines and snowstorms, the team managed to launch their rocket into a suborbital flight on May 11, 2022.
Endurance, named after Ernest Shackleton’s polar expeditions, flew to an altitude of 477.23 miles (768.03 km) and landed in the Greenland Sea 19 minutes later.
Over the 518-kilometer altitude at which Endurance collected data, an electrical charge potential of only 0.55 volts was found.
The rocket had to be launched between open magnetic field lines (blue), otherwise the mission would fail. Only between these lines can the ambipolar electric field lift particles from the atmosphere into space.
Dr Collinson says: ‘Half a volt is almost nothing – it’s about the size of a watch battery, but that’s just the right amount to explain the polar wind.’
Although this force is very small, the researchers believe that over such a large area it is responsible for increasing the height of the ionosphere, a layer of the atmosphere, by 271 percent.
“It’s like a conveyor belt that lifts the atmosphere into space,” says Dr. Collinson.
Because this field has only just been discovered, researchers do not yet know exactly what influence it has on the development of the earth. However, the consequences could be major.
There are indications that this is one of the reasons why there is still water on Earth, while planets like Venus and Mars have dried up.
In 2016, the European Space Agency’s Venus Express mission discovered that Venus’ ionosphere generates a potential of 10 volts around the entire planet.
Because the bright sunlight split the positively charged oxygen ions from the hydrogen in the water, this charge would have sucked these ions into space like a planet-sized vacuum cleaner.
Over time, this process may have dumped all of Venus’s water into space, leaving behind the barren wasteland we see today.
Because Earth’s ambipolar electric field is much weaker, this could be one of the factors determining whether a planet is habitable in the long term.
Dr. Collinson says: ‘Any planet with an atmosphere should have an ambipolar field.
“Now that we’ve finally measured it, we can start to piece together how it shaped our planet and other planets over time.”