Science
Nugget: Lightning Signature Could Help Reveal the Solar System's Origins
Every
second, lightning flashes some 50 times on Earth. Together these discharges
coalesce and get stronger, creating electromagnetic waves circling around
Earth, to create a beating pulse between the ground and the lower ionosphere,
about 60 miles up in the atmosphere. This electromagnetic signature, known as
Schumann Resonance, had only been observed from Earth's surface until, in 2011,
scientists discovered they could also detect it using NASA's Vector Electric
Field Instrument (VEFI) aboard the U.S. Air Force's Communications/Navigation
Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) satellite.
In a paper
published on May 1 in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers describe how this
new technique could be used to study other planets in the solar system as well,
and even shed light on how the solar system formed.