Scientists discover ‘space hurricane’ above Earth

The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) has discovered a “space hurricane” above our planet. It behaves similarly to a regular tropical hurricane, but with electrons rained down instead of water and its emergence from a higher altitude.

“There are tens of space hurricane events from the satellite, which has already been identified by our team, and I think there are more cases in the future and in the dataset that we didn’t finish,” said Qing-He Zhang, a space scientist at Shandong University who led the new research, in an email.

The team’s research focus lies in the interactivity between the ionosphere, an atmospheric layer 50 to 600 miles above Earth’s surface, and the magnetosphere, formed by our planet’s magnetic field. At the poles, this interactivity creates the auroras, nominally known as the Northern and Southern Lights.

Tropical hurricanes are formed by the movements of heavy air masses that produce strong winds; Zhang and his colleagues suspected a similar dynamic to occur in the outer space environment near Earth. The solar wind, a stream of charged particles that flows from the Sun, exerts itself onto Earth’s upper atmosphere and transfers its energy into the ionosphere to form a cyclone.

The research team pored over more than a decade of observations captured by the four satellites in the DMSP to glimpse this cosmic phenomenon for the first time.

Future research into space hurricanes will also help scientists hypothesize the prevalence of space weather beyond Earth—and even beyond our galaxy—creating a domino effect falling towards our understanding of alien worlds and the lifeforms that may inhabit them.

“The space hurricane is likely a universal phenomenon, occurring at other magnetized bodies in the universe (planets and their moons, etc.),” the team concluded in the study. “The process may also be important for the interaction between interstellar winds and other solar systems throughout the universe.”