Reading the article below about a new aurora type thing, I was surprised by the almost casual mention of a gas stream going at 6000m/s, 300km above the earth, at 3000 degrees. I checked the article was not dated 1st April. Is this type of thing not utterly astounding? At 300km up there’s barely any atmosphere left, so to have a stream of gas going so fast and so hot boggles the mind. Is it a function of the extremely low pressure which means concepts of ‘temperature’ are a little different to what we’re used to? If a satellite went through this gas, would it be toasted?

(clicky)

Hmmmm…toast

Muffin?

Yes at low densities temperature becomes less like what we’re used to: it’s a measure of how energetic the particles are and nothing else. A satellite going through it would still need some pretty good shielding as it’s likely charged too (haven’t read the article…).

Looks like a form of plasma, at that speed and temperature.
I’ll check my Flipboard feeds for a bit more info.

This is the bit that amazed me:

It turns out that Steve is actually remarkably common, but we hadn’t noticed it before

(Steve being the jokey name that has been given to the phenomena)