Planet with dual core
My premise involves a habitable planet with a dual core: it has two masses similar in composition to Earth's core, which revolve around each other over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. The revolving motion creates electrical anomalies on the surface of the planet.
My goal is to have the dual-core dynamics working in such a way that they psychologically and physically affect the folks living on the planet, while still providing a habitable environment, with ample flora and fauna. Part of the conceit for the plot is that the core dynamics flare up every once in an eon or so, and that one of these flares occurs during the course of the story.
Regarding the actual possibility of such an event occurring, if the idea gets anyone's juices flowing I can live with it.
That being said, how plausible is this premise?
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I don't know how realistic a scenario this is. I would think that if two cores formed in Earth (this could happen in the early solar system, if another moderately-sized protoplanet hit Earth), they would collide and merger, forming a slightly bigger core. For there to be two cores, they would have to stably "orbit" each other inside the planet. Given the extreme conditions down there, I doubt this is possible.
But that's overly boring, as are a lot of my answers to "What-if" questions. So let's dig deeper. Earth's core is, of course, the source of its magnetic field. Its field forms by the circulation of molten liquid in the outer core, driven in part by Earth's rotation. This creates a dipole magnetic field.
Wikipeda talks briefly about creating a quadrupole field - that is, creating four poles. Two would be "North", and two would be "South". Here is a good visualization. Unfortunately, that one isn't loading here, so I'll go with this one instead:
Image courtesy of Wikipedia user Geek3 under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Here is the caption:
Magnetic field lines of an idealized quadrupole field in the plane transverse to the nominal beam direction. The red arrows show the direction of the magnetic field while the blue arrows indicate the direction of the Lorentz force on a positive particle going into the image plane (away from the reader)
The caption for the other image is this (emphasis mine):
Example of a quadrupole field. This could also be constructed by moving two dipoles together. If this arrangement were placed at the center of the Earth, then a magnetic survey at the surface would find two magnetic north poles (at the geographic poles) and two south poles at the equator.
I doubt you'd see any electrical effects, but you might see an interesting aurora. An aurora is caused by the solar wind interacting with Earth's atmosphere, but the solar wind can also interact with Earth's magnetosphere to create some cool effects. A change in Earth's magnetic field means a change in the magnetosphere, which means some awesome aurora-like events. You can see this question for some more information.
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