Title:
Standing Waves Unexpectedly Discovered at The Edge of Earth's Magnetosphere
Author:
Michelle Starr
Published:
Science Alert, 7 October 2021
From the article:
Space physicist Martin Archer of Imperial College London has been exploring the boundary of Earth's magnetosphere for several years.
"Understanding the boundaries of any system is a key problem," he says. "That's how stuff gets in: energy, momentum, matter."
Recently, Archer and his colleagues discovered that the boundary of the magnetosphere, called the magnetopause, behaves like the membrane of a drum: Strike it with a pulse from the solar wind, and waves, called magnetosonic waves, propagate along the magnetopause towards the poles, and are reflected back towards the source.