Researchers believe they have solved a lingering mystery about how electrons within Earth's radiation belt can suddenly become energetic enough to kill orbiting satellites. Thanks to data gathered from an intrepid pair of ...
Space Exploration
Jul 25, 2013
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0
Astronomers have described the first radiation belt observed outside our solar system, using a coordinated array of 39 radio dishes from Hawaii to Germany to obtain high-resolution images. The images of persistent, intense ...
Astronomy
May 15, 2023
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273
With the flip of a switch, a pair of instruments designed and built by the University of Colorado Boulder and flying onboard twin NASA space probes have forced the revision of a 50-year-old theory about the structure of the ...
Space Exploration
Feb 28, 2013
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0
About 600 miles from Earth's surface is the first of two donut-shaped electron swarms, known as the Van Allen Belts, or the radiation belts. Understanding the shape and size of the belts, which can shrink and swell in response ...
Space Exploration
Jan 19, 2016
9
1126
(Phys.org)—An international team of astronomers and astrophysicists has found some unusual spectral activity involving an otherwise "normal" pulsar; it displayed some absorption lines, which generally only occurs with bodies ...
New research published in the journal Nature resolves decades of scientific controversy over the origin of the extremely energetic particles known as ultra-relativistic electrons in the Earth's near-space environment and ...
Space Exploration
Dec 18, 2013
8
0
New observations from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft hint that the Kuiper Belt—the vast, distant outer zone of our solar system populated by hundreds of thousands of icy, rocky planetary building blocks—might stretch ...
Astronomy
Feb 20, 2024
1
76
Two tough, resilient, NASA spacecraft have been orbiting Earth for the past six and a half years, flying repeatedly through a hazardous zone of charged particles around our planet called the Van Allen radiation belts. The ...
Space Exploration
Feb 12, 2019
3
460
Our day-to-day lives exist in what physicists would call an electrically neutral environment. Desks, books, chairs and bodies don't generally carry electricity and they don't stick to magnets. But life on Earth is substantially ...
Space Exploration
Jul 17, 2012
2
0
Most satellites, not designed to withstand high levels of particle radiation, wouldn't last a day in the Van Allen Radiation belts. Trapped by Earth's magnetic field into two giant belts around the planet, high-energy particles ...
Space Exploration
Sep 4, 2017
0
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