• 2 Posts
  • 35 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 22nd, 2023

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  • Key Points

    • A rocket team reports the first successful detection of Earth’s ambipolar electric field: a weak, planet-wide electric field as fundamental as Earth’s gravity and magnetic fields.
    • First hypothesized more than 60 years ago, the ambipolar electric field is a key driver of the “polar wind,” a steady outflow of charged particles into space that occurs above Earth’s poles.
    • This electric field lifts charged particles in our upper atmosphere to greater heights than they would otherwise reach and may have shaped our planet’s evolution in ways yet to be explored.



  • Disclaimer: I have nothing more than a secondary education level of physics and a keen interest in physics in general.

    It’s common scientific belief that all physical forces are backed up by a field, for example, magnetism by the electromagnetic field, gravity by a gravity field. It would follow that the strong and weak nuclear forces also have corresponding fields.

    For a disruptor to work as seen in fiction, you’d probably be looking to disrupt the weak nuclear force, and would need a mechanism to locally change the properties of the corresponding weak nuclear field.

    I don’t know if there is such a mechanism available to us currently. Hopefully someone else has a definitive answer.