New York, Feb 21 (IANS) When you pray to God for giving us life, include the earth's magnetic field too!
Yes. This is the magnetic field that saves us from planet-sized giant explosions that can gobble up the entire human race!
But Venus - a barren, inhospitable planet with an atmosphere so dense that spacecraft landing there are crushed within hours - is not that lucky as it has no magnetic field.
NASA researchers recently discovered a planet-sized space weather explosion on Venus.
Called hot flow anomalies, these can be so large at Venus that they're bigger than the entire planet and they can happen multiple times a day.
"Not only are they gigantic but as Venus doesn't have a magnetic field to protect itself, the hot flow anomalies happen right on top of the planet. They could swallow the planet whole," said Glyn Collinson, a space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Venus's only protection from the solar wind is the charged outer layer of its atmosphere called the ionosphere.
The hot flow anomalies may create dramatic, planet-scale disruptions, possibly sucking the ionosphere up and away from the surface of the planet.
Earth is protected from the constant streaming solar wind of radiation by its magnetosphere.
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