Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseThe mysterious sources of the Van Allen radiation belts
Daniel and Jorge talk about the strange belts of particles surrounding the Earth, and the South Atlantic Anomaly
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Hey, Jorgey, did you know that we have a planetary defense system?
Nice? Does it involve giant lasers?
Not that I'm aware of?
And how can it work?
Well? This system actually predated the development of lasers by billions of years and it's actually totally natural.
Oh nice, Does that mean it's organic or vegan vegan lasers?
Absolutely? No animals were hurt, but it's actually not all good.
Hmm.
Now you have me worried.
Yeah, it turns out there's a big hole in our planetary defense system.
Really, I bet it's our fault. Was it caused by the lasers?
No?
Actually, the whole is also natural and it has a really cool name.
Uh oh, what's it called?
It's called the South Atlantic Anomaly.
I am more. Hey, I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm actually not in favor of giant planetary lasers.
What do you mean? How can you be anti giant lasers? Aren't all lasers good or at least fun to shoot?
Exactly, A giant planetary laser that you build in the first act must be pointed at some planet by Act three.
This in the science fiction movie you're writing.
It is, but it's also true. You know, you developed some massive laser capable of defending the Earth. That thing will eventually get pointed at some place on the Earth.
Uh well, I mean if you build it on Earth, it's kind of hard to point it at ourselves.
Supervillains will find a way. Mmm, I see.
I guess the aliens just see the giant mirror and then we're.
Toasted exactly exactly. That wasn't such a great idea after all.
Yeah. Well. The third podcast, Daniel and Jorge explained the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we don't worry so much about zapping aliens with lasers, but instead we'd like to think about all the mysteries of the universe, all the things that are deep out there, misunderstood, not understood, that are currently being investigated by scientists, and also the things that are nearby, the things right around us that we are still probing.
Yeah, because there is a lot of stuff out there in the universe. In fact, the whole universe filled with stuff, and some of it is pretty amazing and incredible to learn about and to discover, but some of it can be kind of harmful.
It certainly can be. And there's this consistent story that every time we do something new to explore space, send up a new satellite, build a new kind of telescope, we see something totally unexpected, something that makes scientists go, what are you sure? Did you check your calibrations? And these are wonderful opportunities to learn how the universe works. Every time we get surprised, there's an opportunity to learn something new.
So what happens in your movie, Daniel to the scientist, go, what that needs more calibration shift d F filters on it.
Yeah, exactly. You know the story, some grad student find something weird, as professor doesn't believe him and disregards it, and that ends up being the downfall of humanity, and.
Then somehow the handsome physics professor ends up saving the world.
Wearing a white lab coat. It's the worst movie ever.
Sorry, pressing the laserbud.
Accidentally leaning on the laser button.
Yeah, something. It seems like we are just this rock floating out in space, and there's a lot of stuff that can happen out there. You know, asteroids or solar winds, there's a lot of stuff sort of coming to get us.
Yeah, when you look out into space and you see all those stars, it seems amazing that you can see so far that we can probe the distant depths of the universe and ask questions about what happened billions of years ago and light years away. But what you're looking through is not actually empty. The space between us and those stars, between us and those explosions is not empty. It's full of incredible interactive stuff, and there's a lot to learn just by looking at the things right around our own planet.
Yeah, we live in kind of busy neighborhood, right, I Mean, it's not apparent to the eye, but there is a lot of stuff swirling around us.
Exactly most of the universe is actually invisible. There are neutrinos, there's dark matter, There's all sorts of stuff all around you that you cannot see. So remember you are only seeing a little slice of the universe, the part that radiates in the visible spectrum that you can detect. Most of the universe is invisible to you. But science has built new kinds of eyeballs, new ways to explore the universe and to reveal what's actually happening. And it turns out that right around our planet there's some really amazing things swooshing and swirling.
So to the on the podcast, we'll be asking the question, what are the Van Allen radiation belts? Now, Daniel? Are these? Is this like a heavy metal rock band? Is in Van Allen? Uh? The name for a rock band Van Haleen? I'm thinking Panglien.
It's a crossover between heavy metal and karate.
Yeah, does it involve heavy metals.
If you go beyond black belt in karate, then you get like a uranium belt or plutonium belt, and so yes, those would be heavy metal radiation belts.
Oh man, we smashed heavy metal and karate for no good reason.
Really, that's right. And then you make a band because.
These are radiation belts. They're not even made out of metal.
But those are radioactive metals, you know. But anyway, then you get together with your friends and you have crazy long hair and dance around in leotards and yes you can be a heavy MetalMan.
But yeah. So apparently there's a lot of stuff going out there in space, especially right around this, and some of this stuff is called the Van Allen radiation belt. So we were wondering how many people out there knew what this was and what they mean.
At that's right, So as usual, I asked for volunteers on the internet to speculate without any background information about the next set of questions for the podcast. And if you'd like to volunteer and hear your own speculation on the podcast, please write to us two questions at Danielanjorge dot com.
I'm not sure it sounds like something that a superhero would wear when he wants to irradiate the bad guy.
Man.
If you don't ask me about Van Halen and their belts, probably I could tell you something, But at this moment I don't know about Van Allen.
I vaguely remember this as being like a zone just outside of the planet. That's like a zone of energized particles that are kind of held in place by I don't know, the planet's gravitational pole, magnetic poles, something like that.
The charged particles from solar winds that are sort of captured in giant expanding halos around the Earth, something like that, or two giant ears sort of mouse ears.
Around the Earth.
But I don't know what they do.
Or why they're captured, or what effects they have.
It is a ring of radiation somewhere in space around Earth, maybe between Venus or between Mars and Earth, where there's just an intense amount of radiation that would be very uninhabitable. Even if we had to pass through it. It would cause a lot of damage to electronics or to anyone inside a ship.
All Right, So pretty good guesses did related to the late great and I'm awesome Eddie van Halen.
That's right, edievan Halen, one of the greatest rock and roll guitarists of all time who recently passed away.
Yeah, but not everyone seemed to know what it is. Didn't ring a lot of bells for people.
No, but it did sound like somebody out there has a movie they want to pitch a superhero wearing radiation belts to radiate the bad guys. Somebody, quote unquote, that's totally not me. Done it a lot like you. You think I would interview myself and insert my own ideas into these interviews. That's a genius idea. I can't believe I didn't have.
Actually, I know you interviewed your family all the time. I can recognize their voices.
Now, all right, well, I hadn't had that idea, but now, at some point in the future, I will insert myself doing a false accent into one of these, and I'm gonna wait to see if you spotted. Well.
Either way, it's a great idea for a sequel for your current sized fiction novel. So yeah, So I'm guessing that it has something to do with radiation or particles or electrons and protons floating out in space, maybe in a circular way to call it a belt. So, Daniel, what are the van Allen radiation belts?
So exactly as you say, these are huge belts of radioactive particle, not belts around me or around your waist, but around the Earth. So the Earth is spinning and then also spinning around the Earth. Are all these charged particles that are zooming around very high speeds in these well defined regions, these belts, and there's more than one of them.
Now, are they going in a circle or are they just hanging out in the form of this sortle.
No, they're definitely moving, and they are more in the shape of a doughnut because they're whizzing around the Earth and they're sort of organized more heavily near the equator. Okay, these are sort of amazing because they were a total surprise when they were discovered, and they were one of the first discoveries of the space age. You know, after Sputneck came out, the US was racing and gets stuff up there and it sends something into space. And it was very primitive in the fifties. We were just sort of like shooting rockets in the space with the devices on them. And the guy Van Allen decided to send up basically a Geiger count and say like how much radiation is there in space?
And so this was they sent up a satellite like it was a satellite or just a rocket that went up and down.
It was a satellite, so it would orbit the Earth and collect them bunge of data over lots of orbits, and on board it was a Geiger counter and a tape recorder and the data got beamed down at the Earth using a couple of antennas. But nobody expected there to be much radiation. They thought, you know, space is mostly empty, we're going to send this up here and we're going to see the radiation from the ground decreasing gradually as it goes up. But instead what they saw was that when you go out into space, there's an incredible amount of radiation. This is the first time people understood that space was basically radioactive.
Oh man and so, but it couldn't have gone up that far, right, So this belt is that close to the Earth.
The belt is pretty close to the Earth, and so it's broken up into two main belts. There's the inner Belt and then there's the outer Belt. And the inner Belt is not that far above the Earth's surface. It's like one fifth of the radius of the Earth above the Earth's surface, so you don't have to go that high up.
Yeah, that is pretty close.
It's pretty close, and it stretches out about twice the radius of the Earth, so it's point two two earth radii. That's the Inner belt.
Now, is this belt sort of like near the equator or is it more like a over the shoulder strap or is it like a halo.
It's like a really big donut about the same height as the Earth, so there's not very much over the poles, but there's a lot over the equator.
It's like if you put the Earth inside of a donut and it just barely fits in the hole.
Yeah, exactly. The Earth is sitting in a donut hole of radiation which is whizzing around the Earth at very high speeds and high intensity. And so there's this inner belt and then weirdly there's a gap, and then there's an outer belt. So there's two belts with like this gap in between them.
It's a jelly filled donut. It's like a donut o with an extra hole in it.
It's like a donut with a donut inside of it and an extra hole inside of that. It's like the turd ducan of pastries.
Oh man, And it has radiation and it'll kill you if you eat it, exactly, and it plays heavy metal music.
And so there's this inner belt, and then there's the outer belt, and sometimes occasionally there's a very short lived third belt that lives between them.
What what do you mean short lives? Like it comes on and.
Off, comes on and off, like you'll get it. It'll hang out for like a month or so, and then it'll dissipate. The inner belt and the outer belt are pretty stable, the inner belt more stable than the outer belt. But this third one it comes occasionally and then disappears. And so it's been a bit of a mystery for like the last sixty years. What's making these belts? Why do they come and go sometimes? Why is there a gap in between them? And only recently NASA has been sending up satellites to probe these things and to get some more definitive data, which has led to some pretty interesting answers about what's making these belts, where these particles come from, why they have the weird shapes that they do?
Have a pretty well mapped like we're pretty sure it's a donut shape. What I make guess what I mean is like you know, you see it more if you launch a rocket from the equator, then if you launch a rocket from the North Pole.
Yeah, we have a pretty well mapped Now. NASA sentiut probes in the early twenty tens the Van Allen probes to map these things and get a lot of data, and they found some amazing things, like there's this gap between them, and the gap between them is pretty sharp, like the outer belt starts at sort of like a wall. Now when NASA report described it, like the particles in the outer belt look like they're being repelled by a sheet of glass. It's like a very well defined edge to the inner side of this outer belt.
Interesting, and these particles that are sort of swirling around like a carousel or are they like, I don't know, going around in circles within the.
Donut, They are swirling around like.
All around the Earth or just spinning in place.
They are going all around the Earth, so they're sort of like in orbit around the Earth. But the force that's holding them there, of course is not gravity, because gravity is way too weak to hang onto a particle. But yeah, they're all going all the way around the Earth, zooming around at really high speeds.
Well, and now, are we the only planet that has them or do we see them on other planets or other things in space?
We see them in other planets. Jupiter, for example, has really massive radiation belts and so doa Saturn, and basically every planet that has any kind of stable magnetic field will have these kinds of particles. Interestingly, the Sun doesn't have radiation belts mostly because it's magnetic field flips too often. It's got this crazy eleven year cycle where the magnetic field the north and south pole flip every eleven years. And as we'll talk about in a minute, it's really the magnetic field of a planet that makes these belts and creates their structure. And so that's why the Sun doesn't have one. But all the big planets with stable magnetic fields do.
Yeah, I figured it had something to do with the magnetic field. So we can see them in other planets do but how but they're invisible.
They are, I mean, these are particles, and so you don't see them with the naked eye, but if you're clever, you can detect them. These particles do occasionally radiate, and so if you look for them carefully, you can certainly see them. And we send probes to those planets and so I've seen, for example, maps of the radiation belts around Jupiter and it looks similar. It's like a big fat donut, although in that case that it's more like a really big basketball inside a small inner tube. Because the radiation belt is not as tall as Jupiter, it's more focused around the equator in that sense.
Hmmm.
Now does it also have jelly in it? Or maybe it's a different kind of jelly, or maybe it's a cream donut.
It's actually kind of stormy, you know, because Jupiter is crazy on the surface that it's always getting mixed up and colorful. So maybe it's like, maybe it's like different kinds of jelly. Yeah, it's more like sprinkles.
All right, Well, let's get into where these radiation belts could be coming from and why they're important. Where are they protecting us from? But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniel, we're talking about the Van Allen radiation belts, which I guess are pretty important to the Earth and they must be doing some sort of protecting because we talked about them being a planetary defense system, maybe better than lasers, and they form a big charged donut, radioactive donut around the Earth. So I guess the big question is where do they come from?
Yeah, Actually, they got stuck in our planetary defense system. We have this awesome planetary defense system which is basically just our magnetic field. And you know, the magnetic field is generated by like crazy slashing hot melted metal inside the Earth rotating at like different speeds than the Earth does, and it creates this enormous magnetic field. Then anytime a charge particle comes towards the Earth, the magnetic field does its job and bends it. So the reason that we're not like constantly inundated with radiation from space produced from supernovas or from our sun is because the magnetic field. But the radiation belts themselves are basically like particles that got trapped in our magnetic field instead of getting like deflected and pinging off somewhere else or funneling up and going to become northern or southern lights. They get trapped around the center and they get stuck basically in orbit around the.
Planet interesting forever. Or do they just sort of like circle around and then shoot off.
Well, it's different for the two different stories. The inner radiation belt is much more stable. Those are particles that are sort of like tightly bound to the Earth and it's really pretty fixed now. They don't stay in there forever. They can impact the atmosphere, they can get knocked out. It's a little chaotic, but the lifetime inside the radiation belt can be pretty long. The outer one, though, is much more like a free form cloud. It's further away from the Earth, the magnetic field is weaker, it's more controlled by the stuff outside the Earth and like the solar winds, so that has sort of a fluffy outer edge and things can come and leave much more quickly. But the inner one is much more tightly bound.
I see, it's sort of like bugs trapping your windshield, Like your windshield protects you from the bugs, but when the bugs hit it, they kind of get stuck there.
Exactly exactly if the bugs were like orbiting your car at very very high speeds, then it would be a perfect analogy.
Well, I guess I mean they get stuck in our sort of protective shell of a magnetic field.
Yeah, exactly, the thing that's protecting us gets them stuck on our surface.
Yeah, we need some giant windshield wipers.
Actually, we'll talk about that. There are some really cool ideas for how to reduce the amount of radiation stuck in these belts.
Oh, so, what are these belts mostly made out of and what's in them?
You might imagine that most of the particles and the belts just come from the Sun, because you know, the Sun pumps out a huge amount of radiation protons and electrons and a few other things. But interestingly, the stuff in the inner parts of the belt is not mostly from our solar system. A lot of that stuff comes from cosmic rays, and it has to be really high energy to get all the way down towards the Earth. How far down towards the Earth depends on how much energy you have, because the higher energy particles aren't deflected as much by the magnetic field. So in this inner belt we mostly have protons that are really high energy that have come from cosmic ray collisions, where the cosmic rays have come from, like somewhere else deep in the galaxy.
WHOA. So our magnetic field is that strong that it can deflect super high energy particles from deep in space that well.
It certainly can not all of them, right, And some of these particles, the really super duper highest energy particles, they definitely make it through the magnetic field and hit the atmosphere and create showers. And that's a whole fascinating area of study that we've talked about. Where are these cosmic rates coming from? And so we're sort of glad that some of them make it through, But those are really rare, right. The frequency of the particles drops really quickly as the energy goes up. So the very high energy ones can penetrate through the magnetic field and get to Earth, but there aren't very many of them. The lower energy ones is much more of them, but they're more easily deflected by the magnetic field. So there's a whole spectrum there.
So it's electrons and protons. That doesn't sound too harmful, I guess, does it.
It's mostly protons in the inner one, but these protons have a lot of energy. And for example, one of these protons can penetrate like more than a centimeter of lead, and so you definitely do not want to get hit by this shower of protons.
Oh wow, Yeah, protons, I guess are the ones that can give you cancer, right, I mean they go in and they mess up your dear.
Yeah, they are tiny bullets and they will tear through your body and messed up up and rupture cells and mess up your DNA. And there's a lot of these things that you know, the flux is really intense. You know, it's like millions per square centimeters per second, and the numbers are even higher for electrons, and so it's a really intense amount of radiation. And that's because it just sort of builds up, you know, like cosmic grays just keep coming and keep refreshing it, and so it's a constant source of radiation. You need those windshield wipers up. Stats.
Yeah, there's a lot of bugs out there in space. But I guess what do you compare it to, is I don't know, like a PET scan here on Earth, or is it much more intense than that.
These are much more dangerous than a PET scan, which is carefully tuned to give you the minimum amount of ionizing radiation necessary. The intensities here are just much much higher and much more dangerous. But you know, it's not just protons up there. There are also some electrons, And until recently, nobody really understood like, are these electrons also coming from cosmic rays or is there some other source of them. People were sort of confused because they didn't really understand the energy spectrum of the electrons, and so they couldn't really tell where they were coming from.
Oh, they didn't look like they were coming from the sun.
It didn't look like they were coming from the sun, and they didn't really believe that they were coming from cosmic rays. But then there was a really cool experiment done by a bunch of students at UC Boulder. They sent up a tiny little device to measure this radiation. They attached it to one of these little cube SATs. You know how they can set up these tiny little satellites with little devices on them. So they built this thing. It's like the size of a burrito and we have got ten pounds, and they called it REPTILE, which stands for relativistic electron and proton telescope integrated little experiment, which is a pretty cute acronym, and they got some really interesting cutting edge data. So this is like a science experiment done by students at a university to actually learn something about the nature of the radiation around US.
Ooh, what did they learn.
They showed that the energy of these electrons actually totally consistent with the spectrum you would expect from cosmic rays. So it happens as cosmic rays come in and it hits some particle and you get a bunch of neutrons flying out. Neutrons don't last forever on their own. They fall apart, they turn into a proton and an electron. So they think that the source of these electrons is actually the same as the source of the protons, because the spectrum of the energy of the electrons looks exactly like you would expect from this mechanism from cosmic rays.
Now, are these the ones coming from the Sun or from some mysterious faraway objects.
These are not the ones coming from the Sun. These are probably coming from supernova and something else far away in our galaxy, because they're too high energy to reliably be coming from the Sun. So it's sort of awesome because we're like catching these things from supernovas from other stars deep in our galaxy. We're slurping them up and storing them in our radiation belt. It's sort of awesome. I mean, yes, it's deadly and it's dangerous, but it's also kind of cool and exotic. It's like picking up a shell from.
A beach m and wondering, like where in the planet that came from?
Yeah, exactly. And so we could have this collection of protons electrons around the Earth, each one from a different place than the galaxy. Right, What a cool set of souvenirs.
And so that's the inner beld And is the outer belt sort of the same, just fluffier or does it actually have jelly in it? And can you mix it in with your burritle, your reptile.
Brit reptile burritos eating donuts. The outer one is actually quite different. It's mostly electrons. So the inner one is mostly protons and the outer one is mostly electrons.
Interesting, you know what would make the difference. Why would it be different.
Well, the protons have more momentum. Right, you can speed up a proton to higher energies because it has more mass. For the same charge. It does radiate that energy off as quickly, and so that's why protons tend to penetrate into the inner belt more than electrons do. It's the same reason why we have proton colliders instead of electron colliders. You accelerate electrons to really high speeds, they tend to mostly radiate that energy off by giving off photons. Protons don't do that as much, so it's easier to get them to have a lot of energy. The outer belt is mostly electrons that couldn't penetrate to the inner belt.
But still coming from the same source cosmic rayse.
Well, they don't actually think it comes from cosmic rays because the outer belt actually varies a lot more so the outer belt if you watch it, it changes quickly, like on the timescales of days and weeks. It grows, it shrinks, it changes shape really and you shouldn't see this kind of thing if the source is cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are pretty steady. I mean, you're averaging over a lot of supernovas and a lot of activity from lots of different stars and so on average, there's you know, some seasonal variations, but not on the time scales that we're seeing. So people have been wondering, what is the source of this outer belt. It's not cosmic rays? Is it like, you know, plasma that's floating around the Solar System? Is it something else?
Is it like you know, driving through a cloud of bugs kind of like that. That's what you mean, right, Like maybe out there in space are there clouds of electrons that we sometimes go through?
Yeah, exactly. And so what it looks like is that the magnetic field is actually tearing atoms apart, atoms of stuff that are just floating out there in the Solar System, and then yanking the electrons and actually accelerating them. And so the source of most of these electrons is not like interstellar plasma or something else. It's actually neutral atoms that are getting torn apart to create these protons and electrons, and then the electrons get accelerated and turned into this outer cloud.
Wow, I think I have a new respect for magnetic field. It's like out there ripping it up.
It's doing a lot. Yeah, it's doing a lot. And it's also really buffeted by solar storms. So if you have like a lot of activity on the Sun, like there's a huge ejection of material or you know, something happens on the surface of the Sun, then you got a huge dump of particles towards the Earth. So the solar wind is not constant. It's varying a lot. We call this solar weather. When there's a lot of activity, you call it a solar storm, which is an awesome potential title for my science fiction movie. And it can really change the shape of this It can like wash away part of this outer belt, it can contribute to it. So this the outer belt, is much more dynamic because fluctuates a lot more.
What do you call a sunny day in a solar weather forecast? Extra sonny, bad news toast for toast, burnt toast exactly. Well, I guess my one question is, so these are particles trapped in our magnetic field. Does that mean that like the protons are going one way around the Earth and all those electrons are going the other way. Do they go along depending on their charge? Like, it'd be cool if you know, we actually had in that ring of stuff there's like two massive particles going opposite ways.
Yeah, you know, I hadn't thought about that before. I think you're right though, because as you say, magnetic fields bend particles based on their charge, but it bends positive particles and negative particles in the other direction, which is why, for example, at the collider we actually have two beams. We have a beam of protons going one way and a beam going the other way. They have to have different magnets to bend in opposite directions. And so I think you're right. I think the opposite charge would lead them to go the other directions. So I think protons are probably so the Earth in the other direction from electrons. Yeah.
Interesting, So it's like a double belt.
It's like a double belt, and they can wave to each other as they pass right every time they race around the.
Earth still trapped here. Yes, me too.
And then sort of amazingly, there's this gap in between them. It's not like it's a gradual change from protons to electrons. That's what you might expect that like higher energy particles penetrate more deeply and you get more protons near the surface and more electrons further away, and it's a smooth variation. But no, there's a gap. And this is like a shell, like the inside of this outer belt is like a wall. And then there's almost nothing for a little while between the inner and outer belts.
Wow, what do they think is causing this sudden gap?
They think it's actually radiation from the Earth. If you send photons up out into space, then it basically scatters those electrons, It pushes them out further into space. And so the kind of radiation you need the right energy to bounce those electrons away from the Earth is like at radio wave, and so if you beamed a bunch of radio waves from the Earth, you could like push some of that radiation back out into space.
What are you saying our TV and radio signals are pushing these electrons out.
Yes, they are a little bit, but mostly it's not coming from our broadcast or from this podcast. Mostly it's coming from lightning. When you have lightning in clouds, it generates a lot of photons that's what you see, but also generates photons and spectrums you cannot see. It generates a lot of radio waves, which is one reason why, like electrical storms make it hard to listen to the radio. And so a lot of the reason that there's this inner wall to the outer belt is because of radio waves from lightning pushing those electrons out into space.
Wow, that's wild.
It's pretty crazy. Yeah.
I was gonna say, maybe now that everything's going digital, we'll see decrease in the radio signals.
But but now that we're getting more storms due to climate change, we might actually seem more lightning.
Yeah. Oh man, it's all connected anyway. And so tell me about the third belt. There's a third belt that is sometimes there and sometimes not.
Yeah, so for a long time people thought there was only two belts, and then NASA sent up these probes in like twenty eleven twenty twelve, and they found a surprise. They found this third pocket. It's between the first belt and the third belt, right in this like safety zone in between them, and people were surprised to see it.
Wait, it's in between the between the two belts.
Yeah, exactly, So like another layer of jelly right inside your cronut or whatever it is that we're building this crazy pastry physical concoction.
I think it's a pronut because it's got protons in it and.
Electro nuts and it was right there in between, like in the safe zone where people hadn't seen radiation before, and that was sort of surprising. And then there were surprised again because it disappeared, and so there's this third belot which sometimes comes and doesn't last for very long.
Is it seasonal or is it random?
It's actually it's seasonal, but not based on Earth seasons. It comes from the solar storms. So sometimes the Sun will send like a huge wave of particles towards the Earth, and some of them will get like past this lightning belt and past the magnetic field and end up stuck in the safe zone and slosh around for a little while before they get cleared out.
Or maybe they joined the other belt so I'll get kind of smooched at some point.
Yeah, maybe they get slurped down to the lower belt or ejected out into the outer belt. But the name that scientists have for this kind of event when the Sun like really poor his particles at us, it's pretty awesome. It's called a space tsunami.
No, what that sounds like, I don't know, like a Japanese anime maybe, or it.
Sounds like a Japanese anime. I definitely want to watch.
Yea sure space tsunami, meaning like suddenly the Sun is acting up and so it sounds a huge wave of stuff at us.
Yeah, exactly, See, it's a perfect name because it immediately describes exactly what he's talking about.
I wouldn't go as far as perfect, Daniel. I would come maybe call it a solar tsunami. That sounds better, we are, right, yeah, yeah, but it's spelled with a T. It's like ts ol ar solar tsunami.
I like it, all right.
So that's where they think this third belt comes from, is when the sun is acting up and so, but what makes the particles get trapped in between? Why wouldn't they go to the outer belts?
Yeah, I guess it's you know, some fraction of the particles end up in the inner belt and some of them in the outer belt. But there are also some fraction that can push past this sort of lightning barrier, that have more energy than can be sustained in the outer belt and penetrate past that lightning barrier, but don't quite have enough to get to the inner belt, and then you know, eventually they get cleared. You don't have this constant source of stuff. The reason we don't have a constant third belt in there is you don't have a constant influx, and you do have a process that's clearing them out.
All right, well, that's super fascinating. Let's get into why these belts are important or why they point to something important about our magnetic field. First, let's take another quick break.
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All right? Daniel the Van Allen radiation built, not the Van Halen radiation built. Although they are pretty there's a lot of lightning involved here in an electricity and decon lifestyle of donuts. So I feel like it's it's sort of a tribute to Edivan Hala.
I think if Vanhalen had been around, the next album would have been called Solar Tsunami.
That does sound like a heavy metal album name.
Yeah. Yeah, And these things are fascinating, not just because you know, scientifically we're always interested when we see something new, because it raises questions why is this happening? Why is it not happening? But also there are lots of practical implications to these things.
Yeah, these belts are important, Like are they useful to us in any way?
Well, they could actually be useful. You know, these are particles zooming around at really high speeds, and there's not just protons and not just electrons. There are also some anti matter there. You know, some cosmic rays are antimatter, and sometimes collisions of cosmic rays on the Earth's atmosphere create antimatter, and so there is antimatter up there trapped in these fields, sort of slurping around and antimatter is pretty useful stuff. I mean, you could fuel like a matter antimatter reaction using antimatter, but it's pretty hard to make antimatter.
Wait, these clouds, these belts have anti matter in them.
They do. They have some anti protons, so they're protons swirling around one direction but going around the other direction. There are some anti protons.
Don't they hit the regular protons and explode and annihilate.
They certainly do. And as intense as the flux is, you know, it's also pretty dilute. If you shoot one proton and another proton, you're not likely to actually get a collision. You have to have like a little cloud of them really smash into each other just to have one or two collisions. Like with the Hadron collider, we collide bunches of ten to the ten protons against each other, sometimes get one to five collisions. So it's not that easy actually to shoot a tiny particle at another one.
But aren't they opposite charge, So don't they attract each other?
They do, but they're also moving at really high speeds. It's like you're driving down the freeway and you see somebody really attractive going the other way. Maybe you shot your phone number really fast as they go by, but you know the chances of actually making a connection.
To small I've never tried that dating method, Daniel. Is that how physicists approach their love life.
Well, there's a reason you haven't met a lot of people who met their spouse that way, because I don't think it.
Works exert in the highway, the highway of love.
Anyway. There are some antiprotons out there, and antiprotons are not easy to make. Like we've made some encern in order to study, but we have like pgograms of antimatter we've made over years and years and years. But up in these belts is a lot more antimatter than we've ever made here on Earth. So you can imagine like scooping some of it up and using it to fuel your expedition to a neighboring star by pouring it into your anti matter powered spaceship.
Oh, I guess antimatter is sort of like volatile It's like you can use it as something to burn to give you energy.
Yeah, exactly. You combine it with matter and it turns one hundred percent into energy, into electricity or whatever you need, and that's much more fission than any other kind of fuel we have, even like fusion or fission or anything else is not nearly as efficient as antimatter. So and it matters a great source of fuel. I mean, there's lots of practical questions there about can you bottle it? And can you safely store it? And will your ship blow up? And stuff like this.
Yeah, small, small, practical matters dot dot dot ye, like will you die in the process.
I'm sure if we invite our guitarist slash engineer on board, you know, Eddie van Halen slash van Allen will figure this out for us.
All right, So it's something that NASA is actually considering, like going out there and catching some of these shooting stars or shooting yeah answer mat Yeah.
But you know, considering is pretty broad. NASA considers a lot of stuff because that's sort of their job to think broadly and crazily. They have this group called the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, which you know makes me think of just like people literally throwing stuff against the walls to see if it'll stick. And that's great and I love that kind of like blue sky brainstorming to see maybe this could be a good thing mostly though it's dangerous. Like mostly the radiation belts are a big annoyance. When we send astronauts up into space or even just satellites up into space, we're sending them through these radiation belts and it can be quite deadly.
Yeah, Are they like more dangerous and regular cosmic race or do you consider them cosmic grace because I know we've talked about like astronauts and space stations needing shielding and sun block on them to keep them safe. Is this all part of, you know, just like the regular thing you have to watch out for in space or does it only come up in certain situations.
You definitely have to watch at for cosmic rays whenever you're in space, because you don't have the protection of the Earth's atmosphere or our magnetic field. But this is a spot with really intense radiations, one of the most dangerous places in space, so you have to be really careful when you go through it. You know, there are billions of electrons per square centimeter per second flying through these clouds, and these protons are really high energy. Like I said, they can penetrate even like a centimeter of lead, and so this is pretty crazy stuff. So you don't want to spend a lot of time in these belts. I see.
Now you are like space Shuttle and space stations kind of watch outs. Try to stay clear of these radiation belts or are they always in them?
No, they try to stay clear of them. There's this safe zone and you try to go above them and below them, and so you definitely don't want to spend a lot of time hanging out in these radiation belts. You want to avoid that, you know, if you care about the life cycle of your astronauts, which we do, but also for your satellites.
If you don't want jelly all over your space station.
Also for your satellites, right, these can damage delicate electronics, and so you don't want a really high flux of protons tearing through your delicate electronics or your solar panels for any reason, even if there's nobody living on your space station or on your satellite. Yeah.
Yeah, you were saying that they also interfere with our wireless communications here on Earth.
Absolutely, yeah. I mean it's a huge source of radiation, and so when there's like a solar storm and these things get bigger and more dramatic, then the particles bounce around everywhere, and some of our wireless communication strategy rely on bouncing off the top of the atmosphere, right, like sending radio waves up and having them bounce back. And so this can be interfered with when there's a lot of extra activity in the Van Allen radiation belts.
Sounds like a little bit of a nuisance actually, sort of like a byproduct of protaking ourselves, sort of like the bugs in the windshields. Could we wipe them off the windshield at some point? Wouldn't that make things safer in space?
Yeah? And people are working on this stuff and there's two totally crazy sounding ideas for how to like cleanse the planet of these things. Giant wipers, the giant wipers. One of them literally is giant wipers. And so what they're going to do is they're going to send something up. It's called the high vault system, and you have a satellite which is like a really long wire behind it and the wires held it really high voltage and so basically just what it's literally a space wiper, you know, it's the kind of thing you would see in space balls, but it would like fly around the planet with this high voltage teather and that would be strong enough just like kick these particles out of their geomagnetic orbit and then they would just drift off into space. And they estimate that just like fly this thing around for a couple of months, a few months of wiping, and you reduced the radiation belts by ninety nine percent.
No way, what that is a pretty sensible idea actually, to be honest, just wipe them off. Yeah, just repel them. It's like you're repelling them kind of right.
Yeah, you're repelling them exactly. It sounds a little crazy. I mean, you have this really long tether, really high voltage. It could fry like you know, a person or a satellite. But you know, if you think about where you're going and where all the other satellites are and manage all that, then I suppose it could work.
Wow. Now would that help us if we got rid of all these radiation belts? Would it make life easier for everyone in general?
Yeah, it would reduce danger to satellites and two astronauts and that kind of stuff. They have another system that's not quite as bonkers and maybe not as fun, and that's just to beam a bunch of radio into space. Like we talked about how radio waves from lightning help keep the radiation belts from getting closer to the Earth and they create this safe zone. So if you just like pumped up the radio waves that we were broadcasting, you could help penetrate these radiation belts and cleanse them. You can like puncture them, create a leak, and some of them would flow out. Wait wait, wait, so radio ways are light right, yeah? Radio waves are light.
Are you saying we can shoot lasers at them?
Radio lasers? Yeah? Or we could just you know, broadcast this podcast in laser form up out into space.
Oh wow, our voices right now. It could be help give the Earth a little bit of a cleanse.
Shoot electrons, shoot, get out of here, Get out of here.
Yeah here, this part will be especially efficient.
Nice job. But there are people up there in Alaska building these things and exploring this to see, like, can we pump enough radio waves out past the Earth to help actually push away some of this radiation is a real thing people are actually doing right now.
I wonder if there's some like do these belts accumulate over time or is it pretty stable right now? Because I wonder if like it might get worse.
It might get worse. You know, we've been studying with them for about sixty years since they were discovered, but only in the last ten years we have really a lot of specific data. They're just sort of mysterious for decades and decades, and in the last ten years we've been sending up satellites to get better pictures of what's out there and how it's changing. And that's when we, for example, we learned that there is this third belt, and so it's kind of new to have like a detailed, concrete map of these radiation belts. So we don't have a lot of depth of our time information. We think the inner belt is pretty stable and the outer one is a bit more fuzzy, but it could be that there are longer cycles we're unaware of.
Do you think it's helping or do you think it's maybe killing our magnetic field on Earth, because that could be a problem.
That would be a problem. But I think our magnetic field is pretty robust. I mean, it's generated inside the Earth, and so I don't think there's any danger that these particles are going to use it up or damage it in any way. But you know, our magnetic field actually does have a weakness to it.
What like an achilles heel or kryptonide weakness.
Yeah, just like that. Now it's much more like an achilles heel because you know that the Earth spins, of course, but that the Earth's magnetic axis doesn't exactly match the rotational axis, right, Like the physical north pole around which the Earth spins is not in the same place as the magnetic north pole.
Right, it's a little skewed, it's a little tilted.
It's a little skewed. Yeah, But there's another shift which is important, which is that the center of the magnetic field, Like if you drew a line through the magnetic north and South poles that doesn't line up with the center of the Earth, that's shifted a little bit.
Oh so, and that creates a hole in the magnetic field.
It means that in some places on the surface of the Earth, the magnetic field is weaker than other places. Like if you're on the spot on the Earth where the center of the magnetic field is on the other side of the center of the Earth, then you're further from the source of the magnetic field, and so the magnetic field is weaker. So on one side of the Earth, the magnetic field is a little bit stronger, and on the other side it's a little bit weaker. And where's weaker. These radiation belts dip down closer to the surface.
Of the Earth because they're not as repelled.
Yeah, because they're not as repelled. And so this is called the South Atlantic anomaly because this is basically like a hole in the magnetic field. It's not technically a hole, is more like a weakness over the South Atlantic. It's over the ocean, but it extends out to you know, like Argentina and Brazil, and that's where the magnetic field is a little bit weaker, and these radiation belts come the closest to the Earth.
Oh and it turns with the Earth too, right, because I guess our magnetic field turns with the Earth.
Yeah, it turns with the Earth. And it has a real effect, you know. Like I used to do science with this Fermi telescope that would take pictures of the center of the galaxy and look for dark matter. But anytime it passed anywhere near the South Atlantic Anomaly, it just saw craziness, Like you just couldn't do any science. It was just like bathed in radiation, and so we had like special parts of our code. We're like, are you near Brazil? If so, you know, throw away the data, turn on the windshield wiper exactly exactly because you are hitting a lot of bugs.
Wow. Pretty interesting. So it sort of sounds like the byproduct of staying safe in space, you know, it's just all the stuff we collect as we go through the Solar system.
Yeah. Absolutely, we would much prefer to have these radiation belts orbiting our Earth then have that radiation deposited on the Earth. Right, as you say, it's better to have the bugs on the windshield than in your teeth. But it'd be nice to turn those wipers on occasionally and sort of cleanse ourselves because it's right there and zooming around and it's high flux and it's quite deadly or not.
The wind show wipers would maybe collect them in a way, like you said, it might be possible to collect them and use them for something good.
Yeah, it would be pretty awesome if we were creating antimatter with the Earth and collecting it and using it to travel to other stars. That would be pretty cool.
Right, or even power things here on Earth. Could we have antimatter solar panels in space, and then you transmit the charge through a giant wire to Earth, which also helps you Windchi'll be your debris.
I want to see this movie for sure, and I want to eat donuts while doing heavy metal radiation karate chops while we're doing it.
There you go, you can do it all, Daniel, All right, Well, it's again just an interesting lesson just about all the things that are out there in space that we can't see but are there, and they're doing some amazing physics in the process and telling us a lot about our sun and then about what's in space.
That's right, and it reminds you that there's a lot of accessible mysteries right here on Earth. There are amazing things happening in black holes and supernovas really far away, but there are still a lot of things we have left to figure out about the way that universe works and what's going on in our very own neighborhood.
Yeah, so think about it. Thanks time you look up up the sky at night or even during the day, there's there that there are giant doughnuts in the sky.
Just don't take a bite. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestive to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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