Ozone hole got you down?α Maybe climate change is bringing just a bit too much sunshine and wrecking the grapes in your favorite wine?β Would you cheer up if we told you it could be worse?
Meanwhile, it is hard to imagine the private sector figuring certain things just for the sake of knowing. But, yes, it turns out that things really could be worse.
Two donuts of seething radiation that surround Earth, called the Van Allen radiation belts, have been found to contain a nearly impenetrable barrier that prevents the fastest, most energetic electrons from reaching Earth.
The Van Allen belts are a collection of charged particles, gathered in place by Earth’s magnetic field. They can wax and wane in response to incoming energy from the sun, sometimes swelling up enough to expose satellites in low-Earth orbit to damaging radiation. The discovery of the drain that acts as a barrier within the belts was made using NASA’s Van Allen Probes, launched in August 2012 to study the region. A paper on these results appeared in the Nov. 27, 2014, issue of Nature magazine.
“This barrier for the ultra-fast electrons is a remarkable feature of the belts,” said Dan Baker, a space scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder and first author of the paper. “We’re able to study it for the first time, because we never had such accurate measurements of these high-energy electrons before.”
The more we understand about how the planet protects us against the Universe at large, the more we can learn about how to protect the planet against ourselves.
Pretty straightforward, that. But if you would like to know more about the Van Allen probes, there’s a mission page for that.
α Yes, that still exists.
β A genuine challenge that is already here.
Fox, Karen C. “NASA’s Van Allen Probes Spot an Impenetrable Barrier in Space”. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. 26 November 2014.