New research suggests small solar eruptions could have devastating effects on planets that lack a protective magnetosphere.
The Earth is surrounded by a magnetic bubble that protects it from damage induced by eruptions of solar material, but planets such as Venus do not have a magnetosphere, NASA reported. A mild coronal mass ejection (CME) that hit Venus in 2006 proved to pull a dramatic amount of oxygen out of the planet's atmosphere and into space. These findings could provide insight into what makes a planet habitable.
"What if Earth didn't have that protective magnetosphere?" said Glyn Collinson, first author on the paper at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Is a magnetosphere a prerequisite for a planet to support life? The jury is still out on that, but we examine such questions by looking at planets without magnetospheres, like Venus."
The CME that hit Venus in 2006 moved at a relatively glacial pace of 200 miles per second.
"The sun coughed out a CME that was fairly unimpressive," Collinson said. "But the planet reacted as if it had been hit by something massive. It turns out it's like the difference between putting a lobster in boiling water, versus putting it in cold water and heating it up slowly. Either way it doesn't go well for the lobster."
These findings do not prove that all slow CMEs would have such an intense effect in an unprotected planet, but shows this type of phenomenon is possible.
"This was a rare sighting of a CME that provides a crucial insight into a planet so foreign to our own - and in turn into Earth. The more we learn about other worlds, the more we learn about the very history of our own home planet, and what made it so habitable for life to begin with," the researchers stated.
The findings were made using data from the European Space Agency's Venus Express, which arrived at the planet in 2006.
