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Vast Belts Around Earth Accelerate Particles Close to Light Speed, And Now We Know How
7 FEBRUARY 2021
When you look up at the sky, the region of space around Earth may look as clear as a song, but there s a heck of a lot going on out there that we can t see. In recent years, probes studying radiation trapped by Earth s magnetic field have found something peculiar – electrons zipping along at close to light speed.
That alone isn t the peculiar part; near-light-speed, or relativistic, electrons are well known in the cosmos, boosted by cosmic particle accelerators. The peculiar thing was that occasionally extra fast,
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IMAGE: The contours in color show the intensities of the radiation belts. Grey lines show the trajectories of the relativistic electrons in the radiation belts. Concentric circular lines show the trajectory. view more
Credit: Ingo Michaelis and Yuri Shprits, GFZ
New study found that electrons can reach ultra-relativistic energies for very special conditions in the magnetosphere when space is devoid of plasma.
Recent measurements from NASA s Van Allen Probes spacecraft showed that electrons can reach ultra-relativistic energies flying at almost the speed of light. Hayley Allison, Yuri Shprits and collaborators from the German Research Centre for Geosciences have revealed under which conditions such strong accelerations occur. They had already demonstrated in 2020 that during solar storm plasma waves play a crucial role for that. However, it was previously unclear why such high electron energies are not achieved in all solar storms. In the journal