Manually creating a hole in the magnetic field?

[Forensicmad]

Would it be at all possible to create some sort of hole in the magnetic field around the planet?

Maybe using a highly magnetic mesh at some distance, opposite to that at which the field is flowing? Could you create some sort of pocket where UV could get in?

Just curious

[Martin]

...Could you create some sort of pocket where UV could get in?

 

I am puzzled by your question. I didn't think that the geomagnetic field was what kept UV out!

 

You may know something that I don't, or have something different in mind. but in my simple view of things what shields us from UV (which is just shorter wavelength light) is absorption in the atmosphere, especially in the ozone layer.

 

Magnetic field does not shield against light, which goes straight thru it. I would have said that the earth's magnetic fields shields us from OTHER stuff, like for example the SOLAR WIND.

 

the solar wind is not light (like UV) but is actually charged particles, like protons. ionized hydrogen. fast-moving too!

check out "solar wind" in some place like Wikipedia

If I remember, the particles that make the wind up are going on the order of 10 kilometers a second or more

 

the moon gets hit head-on by the solar wind, because it has little or no magnetic field to DEFLECT the ions.

 

I can't think of any practical way that humans could cancel out the magnetic field and allow solar wind to hit the earth's atmosphere

 

it would be a bad idea to do that, even if we could, I imagine-----but the effect might be spectacular in the sense that if the solar wind were hitting our atmophere instead of being "steered" around the earth by the magnetic field then there would be more than usual NORTHERN LIGHTS all over the planet (aurora borealis)

 

my advice is be happy with the planet you got:-)

[Forensicmad]

Sorry, yeah. I mean solar particles and solar wind.

Just an idea for my book.

[swansont]

A tube of material with high permeability would do this, to some extent. The field would preferentially pass through the material instead of the region inside it.

 

But as Martin has already expained, this wouldn't do anything to shield UV, unless, possibly, you already had a plasma floating around in the atmosphere that was absorbing in the UV, and re-radiating at lower frequencies. Excluding the field might also exclude the plasma, as the charges would tend to spiral along the field lines.