The closer you look at the universe, the more mysterious it seems. NASA’s Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission recently revealed bizarre C- and X-shaped structures floating in the electrified layer of the ionosphere. “Who knew Earth’s upper atmosphere was like alphabet soup?” NASA wrote about the sighting on its website. The two papers describing the C- and X-shaped formations were published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, dated November 2023 and April 2024, respectively.
Who would have thought that the Earth’s upper atmosphere is an alphabet soup?
NASA’s Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission has discovered surprising C and X shapes in an electrified layer of gas high above our heads, the ionosphere.
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— NASA Sun & Space (@NASASun) June 27, 2024
GOLD is NASA’s first science mission “to fly as a hosted payload on an otherwise unrelated commercial satellite.” Its primary goal is to study the interface where Earth’s upper atmosphere meets the surrounding space. GOLD inspects the forces that operate this layer to monitor Earth’s weather and satellite communications. Although these alphabetic shapes have been observed before, GOLD was able to capture them more clearly.
“The fact that we have very different bubble shapes so close together tells us that the dynamics of the atmosphere are more complex than we expected,” said Jeffrey Klenzing, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who studies the ionosphere.
The alphabet soup was observed in the atmospheric layer called the “ionosphere” which extends for about 50 to 400 miles, located above clouds but below space. The name ionosphere comes from the fact that gases in this layer are excited by solar radiation to form ions, which have an electric charge. It grows and shrinks depending on the energy it absorbs from the sun. During the day, the layer becomes electrically charged by sunlight, which knocks electrons off atoms and molecules. This creates a soup of charged particles called plasma that swirls around in the ionosphere.
At night, when these particles are unable to feed on the sun’s energy, low-density plasma pockets called bubbles form. This particle paradise overlaps with the Earth’s magnetosphere. Inside, the charged particles dance on the Earth’s magnetic field. They emit a bright, colorful glow near the Earth’s magnetic equator, and rise up and out along magnetic field lines, creating two dense bands of particles north and south of the equator that scientists call crests. These crests and bubbles can disrupt radio signals and satellite communications.
While previous observations provided brief glimpses of peaks and bubbles in the ionosphere, GOLD has been monitoring these features over longer periods of time using its geostationary orbit, which orbits the Earth at the same speed as it rotates. The instrument previously revealed that an X-shape forms after a massive solar storm caused by a volcanic eruption, but finding it without such events is odd. “The X is odd because it implies that there are much more local driving factors,” Klenzing said. “This is to be expected during the extreme events, but seeing it during ‘quiet time’ suggests that activity in the lower atmosphere is significantly driving the ionospheric structure.”
The X-shaped plasma was accompanied by another unexpected alphabetic bubble that was C-shaped. When GOLD discovered these strange C-shaped bubbles, scientists initially thought that these bubbles were formed by Earth winds. “It’s a bit like a tree growing in a windy area,” Klenzing explained. “If the winds are typically easterly, the tree starts to tilt and grow in that direction.”
The first report of these C-shaped formations was published by a scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), Deepak Karan. Karan and his colleagues reported that these C-shaped bubbles were located in the ionosphere about 400 miles apart. “Within that short of a distance, these two plasma bubbles with opposite shapes had never been imagined, never been imaged,” Karan said, adding that some kind of strong turbulence, such as a vortex, wind shear or tornado-like activity was likely at play in the atmosphere.
Scientists believe that studying this alphabet soup is of the utmost importance. “It’s really important to figure out why this is happening,” Karan said. “If there’s a vortex or a very strong shear in the plasma, it will completely distort the plasma over that region. Signals will be completely lost in a strong distortion like this.” Hopefully, the trigger behind these alphabets will be discovered soon.