- If something is working, it didn’t happen accidentally.
- Randomness can’t even build a bobsled. Ditto for natural selection.
- Planetary magnetism is caused by a dynamo process that rotates, and electrically conducts fluid that acts to maintain a magnetic field. This mechanism causes a celestial body such as our Earth or a star to generate a magnetic field. These planetary magnetic fields are planet specific. Mercury’s field has only two magnetic poles. Venus is a rocky body covered with volcanos. Its magnetic field is much weaker than that of Earth. This magnetic field is induced by an interaction between the ionosphere and the solar wind, not an internal dynamo. Early Mars had a magnetic field. When Mars was Mars was 500 million years old, its magnetic field withered away. The iron-core dynamo that generated its magnetic field shut down billions of years ago.
- Earth’s magnetic field extends from the Earth’s interior out into space, where it interacts with the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emanating from the Sun. We exist under the protection of this magnetic environment. Our solar planets have a magnetosphere (the region around a world dominated by the planet’s magnetic field). Earth’s magnetosphere is a giant bubble. It plays a critical role in our planet’s life-stainability. It shelters us from the storms of solar and cosmic particle radiation. It also keeps the solar winds at bay (the flow of charged particles streaming off the Sun).
- While the North and South magnetic poles are usually located near the geographic poles, they slowly and continuously move over geological time scales but sufficiently slowly for ordinary compasses to remain valid for navigation.
- The magnetosphere is the region above the ionosphere that is defined by the extent of the Earth’s magnetic field in space, extending several tens of thousands of kilometers into space and protecting the Earth from the charged particles of the solar wind and cosmic rays that would otherwise strip away the upper atmosphere, including the ozone layer that protects the Earth from the harmful ultraviolet radiation.
- The Earth’s magnetic field is generated by the motion of molten iron in the Earth’s core. This magnetic field protects our planet from cosmic radiation and the charged particles emitted by our Sun. Every planet in our solar system has some large-scale magnetic field. The size of these magnetic-fields ranges from the local magnetic zones of Mars to Jupiter’s titanic planetary field.
- Magnetic fields are manifestations of electromagnetism. Electromagnetism involves the interaction of positively and negatively charged particles. The fields deflect the particles outwards along the magnetic field lines. Earth has a strong magnetic field because it has a liquid conducting core composed of iron-nickel that rotates swiftly every 24 hours.
- The atoms that make you up are formed by a cloud of negatively charged electrons attracted by the positively charged protons in the nucleus. Magnetic fields are generated by moving electric currents. The rotating iron core in the center of the Earth generates a powerful magnetic field that shields the planet’s surface from dangerous radiation from the Sun.
- Nearly everything you perceive is the result of electromagnetism and its fields. The photons entering your eye are the excitation of a magnetic field. Light is composed of magnetism, and electricity is composed of magnetism. Both stationary and moving charges produce electric field lines, while magnetic field lines are only generated by moving charges.
- If something is working, it didn’t happen accidentally.
- Randomness can’t even build a bobsled. Ditto for natural selection.
