Australian student confirms that giant plasma tubes are floating above Earth

Astronomers have for the first time captured visual evidence of the existence of tubular plasma structures in the inner layers of the magnetosphere surrounding the Earth.

“For over 60 years, scientists believed these structures existed but by imaging them for the first time, we’ve provided visual evidence that they are really there,” Cleo Loi of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) and the School of Physics at the University of Sydney said.

Loi is the lead author on this research, done as part of her award-winning undergraduate thesis and published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

“The discovery of the structures is important because they cause unwanted signal distortions that could, as one example, affect our civilian and military satellite-based navigation systems. So we need to understand them,” she said.