Our planet, along with the rest of the solar system and some nearby stars, may be trapped inside a giant magnetic tunnel — and astronomers don't know why. .

A tube of vast magnetized tendrils, 1,000 light-years long and invisible to the naked eye, may encircle the solar system, astronomers propose in a new paper.

Jennifer West, an astronomer at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, made the proposal after an investigation into the North Polar Spur and the Fan Region — two of the brightest radio-emitting gas structures in our galactic neighborhood — revealed that the two structures might be linked even though they are located on different sides of the sky.

"If we were to look up in the sky, we would see this tunnel-like structure in just about every direction we looked — that is, if we had eyes that could see radio light," West said in a statement. .

The curving tendrils — which are made of both charged particles and a magnetic field, and resemble long, thin ropes — project outward from the North Polar Spur and the Fan Region.

Not only could the strange cosmic ropes link the two regions, but they could form something akin to "a curving tunnel" where the tendrils are like "the lines formed by the tunnel lights and road lane marker," the researchers said. .

But by plugging data from radio wave observations into a new computer model, West and her colleagues mapped out the probable length and position of the gigantic ropes.

West says that the inspiration for her model came when she was a student, seeing the tendrils upon her first inspection of a map of the radio sky.

"Based on the crude data available at this time, the authors (Mathewson & Milne) speculated that these polarized radio signals could arise from our view of the Local Arm of the galaxy, from inside it," West said in the statement.

Another intriguing possibility is that the invisible magnetic ropes could be a small part of a much larger galactic structure. .

"So a next step is to better understand how this local magnetic field connects both to the larger-scale galactic magnetic field and also to the smaller-scale magnetic fields of our sun and Earth