Van Allen Belts
gregladen | March 5, 2013I love it when scientists say that! And, so said scientist Daniel Baker, speaking of a newly observed feature of the famous and well known, or at least, we thought well known, Van Allen Belts.
First discovered in 1958, the Van Allen belts have been thought to comprise two reservoirs of high-speed, electrically charged particles, corralled into separate doughnut-shaped rings by Earth’s magnetic field. The outer ring orbits at a distance of some 10,000–60,000 kilometres above Earth, and encircles an inner band of even more energetic particles, roughly 100–10,000 kilometres above Earth. ...…