Source of Space Weather Discovered [VIDEO]

Through the unprecedented alignment of six Earth-orbiting spacecraft and NASA's lunar orbiter mission ARTEMIS, researchers say they have finally discovered the source of space weather near Earth.

For years, researchers have known that a portion of the energy emitted by the Sun is stored for a short time in Earth's magnetic field until it finally explodes, producing the brilliant auroras.

Still, the invisible process that triggers this unleashing went unobserved. When a large number of spacecraft came together, however, scientists were able to measure for the first time the release of this magnetic energy close up.

Space weather originates from the giant magnetic field surrounding the planet known as the magnetosphere. When solar storms occur, this bubble is stretched out into a teardrop-shaped tail more than a million miles long. Stored magnetic energy is then released in a process that can only be detected when energized particles flow quickly by a spacecraft lucky enough to be in the way.

Such was the case in 2008 when five NASA satellite found that this process, known as magnetic reconnection, triggers near-Earth substorms, which act as the basis for space weather.

There was one unclear piece of information to come out of the observation, however, which was the fact that there did not appear to be enough energy in the reconnection flows to account for the total amount of energy released in an average substorm.

Three years later, in an effort to get a wider look at the magnetosphere, researchers moved two of its five spacecraft into lunar orbits and the ARTEMIS mission was born, offering a unique global look at the energy flow around Earth.

From this, scientists were able to observe magnetic reconnection as it generated expanding fronts of electricity similar to a splash creating ripples in a pond. These fronts are responsible for converting the stored magnetic energy into particle energy.

All of this eventually led up to a time when, in 2012, NASA joined forces with a number of other entities, including the Japanese Space Agency, to measure the total energy driving space weather near Earth.

The amount of energy detected during this observation was comporable to the electric power generated by all the world's power plants, and lasted for more than a half hour, according to the researchers.

Researchers were able to observe as two expanding energy fronts were created on either side of the magnetic reconnection, with magnetic energy transforming into particle and wave energy within a narrow region a mere few dozen miles across.

"We have finally found what powers Earth's aurora and radiation belts," Vassilis Angelopoulos, the principal investigator for ARTEMIS, said in a press release. "It took many years of mission planning and patience to capture this phenomenon on multiple satellites, but it has certainly paid off. We were able to track the total energy and see where and when it is converted into different kinds of energy."