Photo credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Chengming Liu of Beihang University in China and his colleagues have discovered chorus waves in deep space that sound like chirping birds, or so we’d like to think. These peculiar bursts of energy called could pose problems for long-distance space travel.
Two powerful belts of radiation encompass Earth and the particles trapped in this sprawling magnetic field whiz around at close to the speed of light—fast enough to pose grave dangers for any spacecraft or astronauts that hope to traverse them. Some of the deadliest particles achieve such high speeds from acceleration by peculiar perturbations in Earth’s magnetic field called chorus waves, named after their sonic resemblance to birdsong. This phenomenon has long been thought to occur only close to Earth and other planets, but new results suggest such waves are far more common in deep space than anyone realized.
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It’s a very important paper. This could be occurring anywhere in the universe where there’s a magnetic field, which is just about everywhere,” said James Burch of the Southwest Research Institute, who is principal investigator of the MMS mission and a co-author of the study.
