Planetary Magnetic Fields
Kurt Feltenberger 02 May 2018 02:00 UTC
I want to preface this post with a big thank you to everyone who
commented on the Neurological EMP thread; it was a lot of good
information and convinced me that unless there's some sort of
super-science involved, it's a no-go for how the author intended it to work.
Now...planetary magnetic fields. A couple years back, I was researching
coronal mass ejections and solar storms for a PBEM that I was planning
to run. I'm not sure where, but I remember one article (IIRC, it even
had some illustrations) mentioned that when a massive CME hit a planet,
that it had the potential to "stretch" or "pull" the magnetic fields out
of shape and elongate them in a direction away from the sun and went on
to suggest that there could be some unexpected "side effects" of such an
event happening. As I find myself collecting new background material,
this time most likely for a serialized story than an actual game, my
mind went back to this article and came up with two questions:
1. Would/could this happen?
2. What might be the "side effects" if it did? I have a mental image
of a rubber band being stretched away from the sun and then released,
snapping back and momentarily (or for more than a few moments) actually
brushing/hitting the planet's surface. If such a thing happened, what
sort of damage would occur where the field hit the surface?
Thanks!
--
Kurt Feltenberger
xxxxxx@thepaw.org/xxxxxx@yahoo.com
“Before today, I was scared to live, after today, I'm scared I'm not living enough." - Me