As if it were the Star Trek movie saga, a team of scientists from the University of Colorado (USA) has discovered an invisible shield located about 11,500 kilometers above the Earth and whose function is none other than to block the so-called “electrons killers ”, particles that circulate at high speed around our planet and that pose a serious threat to satellites, space systems or astronauts. The finding has been published in the journal Nature .
Researchers have located this unusual protective shield in the Van Allen radiation belts that were discovered in 1958 and that helped to understand that they were two rings of more than 40,000 kilometers, one outer and one inner, full of high-energy electrons and protons, which contracted and expanded depending on the energy disturbances from the Sun.
In 2013, a third storage ring was discovered, located between them, and they all revolve around an “extremely strong” boundary on the inner edge of the outer belt : an invisible shield that blocks ultra-fast electrons. However, none of the approaches or explanations to this phenomenon has found a valid scientific answer for the moment.
“It's kind of like the shields created by force fields that you saw in Star Trek and that they used to repel attacks from alien weapons. It is an invisible shield that blocks these electrons and it is an extremely disconcerting phenomenon ”, explains Daniel Baker, leader of the study.
