每日一翻：Sun’s Magnetic Field Boosts Earth Lightning

You might think of weather as a local—or regional—phenomenon. But when it comes to lightning storms, what happens 93 million miles away… at, you guessed it, the Sun… can actually affect the frequency of thunderbolts. That’s according to a study in the journalEnvironmental Research Letters. [M J Owens et al: Modulation of U.K. lightning by heliospheric magnetic field polarity]

你或许认为天气是一个局部或者区域性的现象。但是当闪电风暴发生时，9300万英里之外发生了什么…你猜对了，太阳实际上能够影响闪电的频率。这是发表在《环境研究快报》杂志上的一项研究发现的。

“So the Sun is essentially a bar magnet. And as it rotates around half the time its field points towards the Earth and half the time its field points away from the Earth.” Study author Mathew Owens, an environmental physicist at the University of Reading in the U.K. He and his colleagues analyzed lightning strikes in the U.K. over a six-year period. And they found that when the Sun’s magnetic field was pointed away from the Earth, lightning strikes in the U.K went up 50 percent. Owens says what they think is happening is the Sun’s magnetic field affects the Earth’s magnetic field, stretching and skewing it, which allows more cosmic rays to hit the atmosphere.

“所以，太阳本质上是一个条形磁铁。由于它的自转，它的磁场点会有一半的时间是朝着地球，一半时间远离地球。”这项研究的作者Mathew Owens是英国瑞丁大学的一名环境物理学家。他和它的同事分析了六年间发生在英国的闪电。他们发现当太阳的磁场点远离地球，英国闪电发生的概率提升了50%。 Owens说他们认为之所以会这样原因是太阳磁场影响地球磁场，使地球磁场拉伸和扭曲，从而会让更多的宇宙射线可以撞击大气层。

That’s important, because cosmic rays can trigger lightning. “Some groups in America do outrageously cool things like fire rockets with metal wires attached to them into clouds. And that directly triggers the lightning. Because the lightning has a nice metal wire to travel down.”

这个结论是重要的，因为宇宙射线能诱发闪电。“一些美国的组织做了一些非同寻常的酷事，比如用火箭把金属导线连接到云层。这会直接诱发闪电，因为闪电有了一个能够传递的导线。”

Nature doesn’t do that, of course. But cosmic rays serve a similar purpose. “These energetic particles that are coming from space essentially produce thin channels of ionization that behave like a thin metal wire. And that enables lightning to occur from the bottom of the cloud to the Earth.”

当然，大自然不会这么做。但是宇宙射线可以达到同样的目的。“这些来自太空的高能粒子本质上是使传播的通道电离，就像一根很细的导线。这导致了从云的底部到地球表面闪电的发生。”

These types of studies could eventually improve lightning forecasts, Owens says. And since lightning strikes are predicted to increase in a warming world…we may end up seeing less of the Sun itself… but more of its electrifying influence.

Owens说这种类型的研究最终能够提高闪电的预告水平。自从预测到闪电的发生会导致全球变暖，以后我们或许会更少的去看太阳本身，而更多的是它的惊人的影响力。

—Christopher Intagliata

转载请注明出处fullstackdevel.com：SEAN是一只程序猿 » 每日一翻：Sun’s Magnetic Field Boosts Earth Lightning

相关推荐