The invisible, weak energy field surrounding our planet Earth has finally been detected and measured. It’s called a dipole field, an electric field first hypothesized more than 60 years ago, and its discovery will change the way we study and understand the behavior and evolution of our beautiful, ever-changing world.

“Any planet with an atmosphere should have a bipolar region,” says astronomer Glyn Collinson of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Now that we’ve finally measured it, we can start to study how it shaped our planet and other planets over time.”

The Earth is not just a lump of land in space. It is surrounded by all sorts of fields. This is the gravitational field. We don’t know much about gravity, especially considering how ubiquitous it is, but without gravity we wouldn’t have a planet. Gravity also helps hold the atmosphere close to the surface.

There is also a magnetic field created by the spinning of conductive material in the Earth’s interior, which converts kinetic energy into a magnetic field that radiates into space. This protects our planet from the effects of solar wind and radiation, and helps prevent the atmosphere from blowing away.

In 1968, scientists described a phenomenon that we had not noticed before the space age. A spacecraft flying over the Earth’s poles detected a supersonic wind of particles escaping from the Earth’s atmosphere. The best explanation for this was a third: the electric energy field.

“It’s called a dipole field, and it’s an agent of chaos,” Collinson explains in the video, “and it acts against gravity and throws particles into space. “But we’ve never measured it before because we didn’t have the technology. So we built the Endurance launch vehicle to go after this big invisible force.”

The ambipolar field is supposed to work this way. Starting at an altitude of about 250 kilometers (155 miles), in a layer of the atmosphere called the ionosphere, extreme ultraviolet and solar radiation ionize atmospheric atoms, stripping them of negatively charged electrons and turning the atom into a positively charged ion.

Lighter electrons will try to fly into space, while heavier ions will try to fall to the ground. However, the plasma medium will try to maintain charge neutrality, which will cause an electric field to appear between the electrons and ions, binding them together.

This area is called bipolar because it works both ways: ions pull electrons down, and electrons pull them up. As a result, the atmosphere swells; increasing altitude allows some ions to escape into space, which we see in polar winds.

Because this dipole field is incredibly weak, Collinson and his team designed instruments to detect it. The Endurance mission that conducted the experiment launched in May 2022 and reached an altitude of 768.03 kilometers (477.23 miles) before returning to Earth with valuable, hard-earned data. And it was successful. It measured a change in electric potential of just 0.55 volts, but that’s all it took.

“Half a volt is almost nothing; it’s about the same amount of power as a watch battery,” Collinson says. “But that’s exactly the amount that accounts for the polar wind.”

Such a charge is enough to attract hydrogen ions with a force 10.6 times greater than the force of gravity, shooting them into space at supersonic speeds measured above Earth’s poles. Oxygen ions, which are heavier than hydrogen ions, also rise higher, increasing the density of the high-altitude ionosphere by 271 percent compared to what it would be without the dipole field.

What’s even more exciting is that this is just the first step. We don’t know the broader impacts of the bipolar field, how long it has existed, what it does, and how it helps shape the evolution of our planet, its atmosphere, and perhaps even life on its surface.

“This field is a fundamental part of how the Earth works,” Collinson says. “And now that we’ve finally measured it, we can start asking some of these big and exciting questions.” The results of the research are published in the journal Nature.