Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Billion-Degree Cloud Around Earth

Posted by chrisd on from the one-big-hot-thought-bubble dept.

texchanchan writes "From a report on Yahoo: 'The Earth's outer atmosphere works as a heat shield to deflect and absorb some of the damaging energy [of solar wind], but in the process creates a billion-degree cloud of electrified gas that sets up loops of multimillion amp electric current.' That's pretty wild to be going on over our heads. Researched at NASA's IMAGE project. Here's the press release, with links to movies of the electrical excitement."

1 of 13 comments (clear)

  1. How (hot? by jcabrer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A billion degrees?!!! That's damn hot! How do we manage to send spacecraft to the other planets (or the moon for that matter) when there is such an obstacle surrounding us? Could the conspiracy theorists be right?