space bubbles
The ESA's Cluster mission discovered a very cool property of the interaction between the earth's magnetic field and the solar wind. The four spacecraft flying in tetrahedral formation are capable of studying small-scale structures of the magnetic field in three dimensions. To the ESA's surprise, they found bubbles of low-density gas embedded at the bow shock between the solar wind and the earth's magnetic field. These bubbles, some a thousand kilometers across, have a much higher temperature than the surrounding solar wind, around ten million degrees Celcius (about ten times hotter than the solar wind). The density of these bubbles is also much lower than the surrounding gas, which is itself pretty close to being a vacuum.
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