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National Geographic: Giant Veil of "Cold Plasma" Discovered High Above Earth
Clouds of charged particles stretch a quarter the way to the moon, experts say.

Dave Mosher for National Geographic News Published January 26, 2012

Clouds of "cold plasma" reach from the top of Earth's atmosphere to at least a quarter the distance to the moon, according to new[?] data from a cluster of European satellites.

Earth generates cold plasma—slow-moving charged particles—at the edge of space, where sunlight strips electrons from gas atoms, leaving only their positively charged cores, or nuclei.

Researchers had suspected these hard-to-detect particles might influence incoming space weather, such as this week's solar flare and resulting geomagnetic storm. That's because solar storms barrage Earth with similar but high-speed charged particles.

Still, no one could be certain what the effects of cold plasma might be without a handle on its true abundance around our planet.

"It's like the weather forecast on TV. It's very complicated to make a reasonable forecast without the basic variables," said space scientist Mats André, of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics.

"Discovering this cold plasma is like saying, Oh gosh, there are oceans here that affect our weather," he said...

Anomalies in the Cluster II data turned out to be shockwaves from cold plasma particles moving around the satellites.

Cold Plasma a Space Weather "Elephant"

In the end, the pair found that cold plasma makes up between 50 and 70 percent of all charged particles within the farther reaches of Earth's magnetic field.

André says it's now time to start updating space-weather models to take the extra cold plasma into account—at this point, for instance, nothing is known about how the plasma might affect solar storms.

This influence is "not a minor thing in space weather," André said. "It's an elephant in the room."
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Mini Magnetic Shield Found on the Moon
April 14, 2010

...Earth is fully enveloped in its magnetosphere... creating a magnetic dynamo that generates a global magnetic field.

Extending up to 52,000 miles (78,000 kilometers) above the surface, Earth's magnetic field traps and redirects the constant stream of charged particles from the sun, aka the solar wind, which could otherwise fry life as we know it.

Sometimes, when a burst of solar activity overloads Earth's magnetosphere, charged particles seep through and interact with our atmosphere....