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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."

3 of 13 comments (clear)

  1. Whole earth solar cell by Perdo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Great, a new source of energy. How do we tap it? An electricly conductive line hanging from space? A heat pump that works on the temperature differential between the hot zone and orbital shaded vacume?

    Sounds like a threat to any potential space elevator too. Or perhaps a space elevator could be used to tap the energy.

    --

    If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.

  2. 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?

  3. What is a degree? by fava · · Score: 2, Informative
    What we know as temperature is actually a measure of the average kenetic energy of all the molecules in our sample, in other words its a measure of average speed.

    What a billion degrees means is the molecules are moving very fast, however because there are so few of them the total effect is minimal.