NASA discovers planet-wide electric field around Earth that's shooting bits of our atmosphere into space

NASA has detected a planet-wide electric field surrounding Earth for the first time ever.

The field, known as the ambipolar electric field, was discovered by NASA's suborbital Endurance rocket more than 60 years after it was first hypothesized, and is thought to be as fundamental to our planet as its better known magnetic and gravitational fields.

By studying it, scientists hope to get a better understanding of how our planet's atmosphere evolved and how it behaves today. The researchers published their findings Aug. 28 in the journal Nature.

"Any planet with an atmosphere should have an ambipolar field," study lead author Glyn Collinson, principal investigator of the Endurance mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. "Now that we've finally measured it, we can begin learning how it's shaped our planet as well as others over time."

In a layer of Earth’s atmosphere known as the ionosphere (located between 37 to 190 miles (60 to 300 kilometers) above the Earth's surface), ultraviolet radiation from the sun bombards atoms, stripping them of electrons to transform them into ions. In theory, this should create a slight electric field around our planet, as well as others like it.

Hints of the electric field's existence were first detected in 1968 by spacecraft flying over our planet's North and South Poles. They came in the form of a "polar wind," or a stream of particles that were streaming from Earth's atmosphere into space.

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