Visualizing the Earth's Magnetic Field

The iron-cored Earth behaves like a great magnet, generating a huge magnetic field around the planet that protects it from blasts and harmful radiation from the sun.

The recently released NASA visualization above shows this field, called the magnetosphere, as it might look from space.

This view is conceptual, but based on real science observations that have been made since the beginning of the Space Age. The orange and blue lines depict the opposite north and south polarity of Earth's field lines.…

See SPACE.com for links to further info.