This animation illustrates “plasma tubes”, associated with Earth’s magnetic field lines, discovered by CAASTRO using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA).
Client: CAASTRO (ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics)
From the CAASTRO YouTube page:
By creatively using a radio telescope to see in 3D, astronomers have detected the existence of tubular plasma structures in the inner layers of the magnetosphere surrounding the Earth.
“For over 60 years, scientists believed these structures existed but by imaging them for the first time, we’ve provided visual evidence that they are really there,” said Cleo Loi of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) at the University of Sydney.
Ms Loi is the lead author on this research, undertaken as part of her award-winning undergraduate thesis and published in Geophysical Research Letters today. In collaboration with international colleagues, she identified the structures.
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