Observations from the Van Allen Probes suggested that high-energy electrons are often not present in this inner radiation belt, at least not during the first few years of that mission, from 2012 ...

The discovery of the new belts, made possible by NASA’s Colorado Inner Radiation Belt Experiment (CIRBE) satellite and published on 6 February 2025, in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space ...

Just beyond low-Earth orbit, the planet is surrounded by radiation belts sometimes called the Van Allen belts after astrophysicist James Van Allen who described them in 1958. "The Earth’s ...

The largest solar storm in two decades hit Earth in May 2024. For several days, wave after wave of high-energy charged ...

The discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts by the U.S. Explorer 1 mission in 1958 marked a prominent milestone in space physics and demonstrated that Earth’s magnetosphere efficiently accelerates ...

As they travel up to 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) from Earth's surface, they should pass through the Van Allen radiation belts, which are two donuts of intense radiation surrounding Earth.

Knowridge - August 19, 2024 This graphic shows a cutaway model of Earth’s radiation belts with the two Van Allen Probes satellites flying through them. Credit: NASA.

“As Van Allen said when he discovered the radiation belts, space is not empty, space is radioactive,” says David Sibeck, a scientist for NASA’s Van Allen Space Probes mission.

Villadsen is co-author of a new study documenting the discovery of a first radiation belt outside of our solar system, using a coordinated array of 39 telescopic satellite dishes across a distance ...

An illustration showing the donut-shaped Van Allen radiation belts swirling around Earth, with electrons spiraling through them.(Image credit: Zhang, et al., Nature Communications, 2022) ...

Another issue was the sheer complexity of physical processes governing the energetic electron dynamics in the belts. The radiation belt region is filled with various plasma waves that can accelerate ...