by There was a sudden rupture in the cosmic order on Mars about a year ago. It was almost as if the red planet had been briefly transported to another solar system.
Normally in our solar system, the sun is constantly pouring out a stream of charged particles and magnetic fields, known as the solar wind.
This wind washes over the planets and exerts a pressure on them that helps keep them in their atmosphere. It also interacts with their atmosphere to create aurorae – the colorful northern lights often seen on Earth.
However, in December 2022, the solar wind around Mars suddenly disappeared, and the planet’s atmosphere rose thousands of kilometers as a result.
NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft, which orbits Mars, saw the whole thing. Scientists announced their findings about the event at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in San Francisco, on Monday.
Brush eruption on the sun the solar wind
The scientists determined that the sun had emitted a burst of high-speed solar wind, leaving a region of the normal solar wind, which left behind a vacuum.
“Every solar storm is different, but this one is different,” Shannon Curry, principal investigator of the MAVEN mission, said in the briefing.
At Mars, according to MAVEN data, there was little solar wind – the density of solar particles dropped by a factor of 100. As a result, Mars’ atmosphere expanded by thousands of kilometers.
This type of unusual phenomenon was last seen in 1999, when a NASA satellite observed that the solar wind effectively swirls around the Earth, causing our planet’s own atmosphere to swell five times more than normal, NASA scientists said.
The mysterious adventure may offer clues in your search for alien life
NASA scientists jumped to study this rare, big event for several reasons.
For one, “Solar events will be really important to understand for human exploration of Mars,” Curry said.
That’s because the Earth’s atmosphere protects us from the sun’s shenanigans, but astronauts in space are at risk of the extreme radiation that can come with solar flares.
NASA plans to send humans to Mars one day, which will put them in an extended window of exposure to the solar wind and radiation. The journey would take two to three years in total, Popular Science reports. By comparison, NASA astronauts usually only stay on the International Space Station for six months and the longest human spaceflight on record was 437 days.
The waning solar wind also hints at how Mars became a dry, harsh, lifeless place.
The planet used to be lush with water, and scientists suspect that Martian microbial life could have existed at that time. But the atmosphere of Mars collapsed into space, leaving it too cold and exposed to liquid water.
Curry said powerful solar wind barrages may have eroded the Martian atmosphere. To find out if this is the case, it helps to study the other extreme, when the solar wind disappears.
Alien life has another secret to understanding the escape of the solar wind: The event offers insight into how rocky planets might look around other, less windy stars.
The magnetic profile of Mars also changed
The solar wind also interacts with the planet’s upper atmosphere to create its magnetosphere – the region of space where the Martian magnetic fields dominate.
Just like Earth, the magnetosphere surrounding Mars acts like a bubble around which the solar wind must flow.
But when the solar wind disappeared, the magnetosphere disappeared, bypassing the entire orbit of the MAVEN spacecraft.
As quickly as the solar wind disappeared on December 25, 2022, however, it was back by December 27, 2022, and Mars’ atmosphere and magnetosphere returned to their regular proportions.
As the sun becomes more active, more rare events like this can occur
The sun is nearing the peak of its 11-year cycle, which means its surface plasma is bubbling, creating more sunspots and emitting more eruptions, solar wind floods, and other extreme events.
On Earth, we know that solar flares and solar storms can create beautiful auroras, wreak magnetic havoc that messes up compasses, knocks satellites out of orbit, and even jams radio signals and disrupts power grids.
Next year, as solar activity continues to peak, NASA’s MAVEN mission may have more opportunities to study such solar flares from the Martian perspective.
Read the original article on Business Insider
