iVillage

A high wind of hydrogen blows all night and day through our solar system. It emanates from the Sun and rushes past the Earth at some 400 km per second and out into interstellar space. It sweeps like a broom gases that have evaporated from planets and meteoritic dust. The solar wind is responsible for the outer portions of the Van Allen radiation belts, for the aurora in the Earth’s atmosphere, and for terrestrial magnetic storms, perhaps even the general weather patterns.

In recent year, the phenomenon of the solar wind has become of more interest to researchers. This solar wind blows far out into the solar system and beyond. The earth’s magnetic fields serve to shield us from direct contact with the solar wind’s charged particles. The earth’s magnetic field is rounded toward the sun, and stretches out in a long tail away from the sun, just like a comet. The solar wind rushes around and past the earth and on out into space.

A most important function of the solar wind, which acts like an aura out as far as Saturn (during the years of high solar activity, the sunspot cycle) is to push back cosmic ray particles coming from outside our solar system. The intensity of cosmic rays reaching the Earth is cut in half during the years of highest solar activity.

One way of looking at this phenomenon is that the Earth and the inner planets are wrapped in a cloak or aura of solar particles for several years and thus shielded from information trying to reach us from deep space. As the Sunspot cycle ebbs and the aura withdraws, the cosmic rays once again penetrate in greater numbers into the inner solar system and to the Earth. There were sunspot minimums in 1964 and 1976.

It is important to note that the moon passes through the different sections of the earth’s magnetic sphere in its monthly orbit. At New moon it is always in the upstream portion of the magnetosphere, facing the sun and downstream in the earth’s tail at Full moon. At First Quarter, the moon is to the dusk side of earth and at Fourth Quarter, the moon is in the dawn side of the magnetosphere.

The interrelationship of the solar wind and the earth’s magnetosphere is receiving considerable attention in recent years. It has been suggested that the passage of the moon through the earth’s magnetic shield may serve to trigger various weather and magnetic activity. The interrelationship of indicators like the geomagnetic index, solar flux and other measures of solar activity with the moon is just now in the process of being researched and understood.