Tag Archives: 2012

Clouds of charged “cold plasma” particles reach from the top of Earth’s atmosphere to at least a quarter the distance to the moon, according to new data from a cluster of European satellites. Earth generates cold plasma—slow-moving charged particles—at the edge of space, where sunlight strips electrons from gas atoms, leaving only their positively charged cores, or nuclei. Researchers had suspected these hard-to-detect particles might influence incoming space weather, such as this week’s solar flare {January 22, 2012] and resulting … Continue reading →