Radiation ring around Earth mysteriously appears, then dissipates

High above Earth’s surface float two rings of energetic charged particles, and for about four weeks in September, they were joined by a third. The temporary ring may have formed in response to a solar shock wave that passed by Earth, researchers report online February 28 in Science. The discovery could force scientists to revisit decades of ideas about the structure of the Van Allen belts, donut-shaped rings of radiation trapped in orbit by the planet’s magnetic field.

Those revisions could improve predictions of space weather and scientists’ understanding of the space environment near Earth, resulting in better protection for manned and unmanned spacecraft that navigate those areas. “It's a very important discovery,” says Yuri Shprits of the University of California, Los Angeles, who wasn’t involved in the study.

“Over half a century after the discovery of the radiation belts, this most important region of space where most of the satellites operate presents us with new puzzles.” Until the discovery, researchers thought the Van Allen belts always contained two zones of high-energy particles: an inner zone made mostly of protons and some electrons, and an outer zone dominated by electrons. A sparsely populated area separates the zones. The belts run from the top of the atmosphere, some 1,000 kilometers above Earth’s surface, to as far as five or six Earth radii from the planet’s surface.