A Sydney University student has for the first time used radio telescopes like a giant pair of electronic eyes to locate huge plasma tubes in the atmosphere that interfere with astronomy observations and which could affect some civilian and military navigation systems.
Scientists have long thought that the interaction of the earth's magnetic field with energy from the sun would create huge tubes of plasma. But they have never been able to directly observe them over large scales or determine their shape. Until now.
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Ms Loi, who graduated in March, had to overcome the initial scepticism of senior colleagues who thought her observations were too good to be true.
Her undergraduate supervisor, Dr Tara Murphy, said: "It is to Cleo's great credit that she not only discovered this but also convinced the rest of the scientific community. As an undergraduate student with no prior background in this, that is an impressive achievement.
"When they first saw the data, many of her senior collaborators thought the results were literally 'too good to be true' and that the observation process had somehow corrupted the findings. But over the next few months, Cleo managed to convince them that they were both real and scientifically interesting."
The tubes are in the earth's upper atmosphere, known as the ionosphere, which largely consists of ionised oxygen. The ionosphere is so called because photons from the sun dislodge electrons from otherwise neutral atoms in this layer of the atmosphere, creating a soup or plasma of electronically charged particles. This plasma interacts with the earth's magnetic field, creating field-aligned ducts of the plasma.
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Ms Loi told Fairfax Media that tubes "almost certainly stretch upwards into the plasmasphere", where ionised hydrogen and helium are more prevalent.
"For more than 60 years, scientists believed these structures existed but by imaging them for the first time, we've provided visual evidence that they are really there," said Ms Loi of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) at the University of Sydney.
