Scientists discover new electric field on Earth 'as important as gravity'

A team of scientists have discovered a planet-wide electric field believed to be as fundamental to Earth as magnetic fields and gravity.

The new research focuses on the ambipolar electric field which was first theorised over 60 years ago by NASA's suborbital Endurance rocket, with scientists wanting to explore how the planet's atmosphere evolves and the behaviour behind it.

Published in the journal Nature, study lead author Glyn Collinson, principal investigator of the Endurance mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre explained that planets with an atmosphere "should have an ambipolar field," adding: "Now that we've finally measured it, we can begin learning how it's shaped our planet as well as others over time."

In the ionosphere (a layer of Earth's atmosphere located between 60 to 300 kilometres above the surface), ultraviolet radiation from the sun blitzes atoms and strips them of electrons. Subsequently, they are being transformed into ions and creating a slight electric field around our planet.

The first detection dates back to 1968, when spacecraft came into "polar wind" while flying over the North and South Poles.

This means that some of the Earth's atmosphere is predicted to escape into space, especially after being heated up by sunlight. More bizarrely, the particles in the polar wind were cold and had not been heated up, but somehow still moved at speeds that broke the sound barrier.

"Something had to be drawing these particles out of the atmosphere," Collinson said.

Scientists delved into this further by launching an Endurance rocket from Svalbard near the North Pole, reaching an altitude of 768.03 km before crashing back down in the Greenland Sea 19 minutes later.

It detected a miniscule 0.55 volt change, about the strength of a watch battery. Nonetheless, this voltage difference pushes hydrogen ions, the most abundant particles in the solar wind, with a force 10.6 times stronger than gravity.

"That's more than enough to counter gravity — in fact, it's enough to launch [atmospheric particles] upwards into space at supersonic speeds," co-author Alex Glocer, Endurance project scientist at NASA Goddard, said in the statement.

"It's like this conveyor belt, lifting the atmosphere up into space," Collinson added.

Now that the field has been detected, the scientists say that studying the field should help us learn how it changed Earth's atmosphere across our planet's lifetime. They also expect to find similar electric fields in the atmospheres of planets such as Venus and Mars.

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