Earth-Shrouding Plasma Tubes

If you haven't seen this by now, you'll want to check it out! It seems that the world of astrophysics has been set all agog by a brilliant Australian undergraduate student's recent discovery. Cleo Loi from the University of Sydney has used a combination of radio telescopes to prove the existence of earth-surrounding tubular plasma ducts. Travelling from the ionosphere to the edges of space, these multi-layered plasma tubes were believed to exist but were never proven ... until Ms. Loi and her team managed to image them:


What the implications might be when it comes to their influence on radio propagation, if any, remains to be seen but I suspect that astrophysicists all over the world are having a close examination of long-held theories and the implications on their own fields of study.

You can read more details about this exciting discovery here.