Zwan-Wolf effect

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:02]December 2023, a scientist is staring at his screen and suddenly stopped. [music] >> [music] >> He whispers, "What is this?"

[00:00:19]>> [music] >> What he found had never been seen in any planetary atmosphere in 50 years of space science.

[00:00:28]NASA's MAVEN spacecraft was orbiting Mars. [music] Data was flowing in.

[00:00:32]Everything looked normal.

[00:00:35]Then, strange wiggles appeared in the magnetic field readings.

[00:00:40]>> [music] >> Christopher Fowler, scientist at West Virginia University, assumed it was an instrument error.

[00:00:48]It wasn't.

[00:00:54]What he found was the Zwann-Wolf effect.

[00:01:00]Think of a toothpaste tube being squeezed.

[00:01:07]The paste has no choice. It shoots out in one direction through the tube.

[00:01:12]The Zwann-Wolf effect does the same to charged particles, squeezing them along magnetic structures called flux tubes. This effect was first discovered in 1976.

[00:01:23]For decades, it was only ever seen in Earth's magnetosphere, never in [music] any planetary atmosphere, ever.

[00:01:32]Mars has no global magnetic field. It is exposed, unprotected.

[00:01:39]Scientists assumed this effect was impossible there.

[00:01:42]>> [music] >> Mars proved them wrong.

[00:01:49]>> [music] >> Then came a massive solar storm.

[00:01:58]The sun fired a wave of charged particles directly at Mars.

[00:02:03]>> [music] >> That storm amplified something that was likely always happening, but always invisible.

[00:02:10]Deep inside Mars' ionosphere, below 200 km, particles were being squeezed and distributed exactly like the Zwann-Wolf effect to Earth. Fowler's own words, "No one expected this could even occur in an atmosphere."

[00:02:25]This is not just about Mars.

[00:02:27]>> [music] >> Venus, Saturn's moon Titan, both unmagnetized, both now under suspicion.

[00:02:38]Has this been happening across [music] the solar system and we simply never looked?

[00:02:45]And when humans travel to Mars, solar storms could be fatal.

[00:02:51]>> [music] >> This discovery changes how we understand space weather, planetary survival, and what we thought was impossible.

[00:02:59]In December 20