Jupiter Probe confirms ideas about Earth's Van Allen Belts

The first thing you have to know is that the Earth is submerged in the center of doughnut-shaped belts made of energetic charged particles. We call this the Van Allen Belts, after James Van Allen who discovered the Earth's radiation belts 50 years ago using the first US satellite, Explorer I.

Within the Van Allen belts, we observe occasional flurries of high-energy electrons that are known to mess with the electronics inside communication and other types of satellites. It has been theorized that these high-energy electrons are accelerated by very low-frequency radiowaves. Understanding these high-energy electrons is key in being able to predict their behavior, and make the Van Allen belts safer for satellites.

Using data collected at Jupiter by the Galileo spacecraft, Dr Richard Horne of British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and colleagues from UCLA, and the University of Iowa found that a special type of very low frequency radio wave is strong enough to accelerate electrons up to very high energies inside Jupiter's magnetic field.

According to Dr Horne, "We've shown before that very low frequency radio waves can accelerate electrons in the Earth's magnetic field, but we have now shown that exactly the same theory works on Jupiter, where the magnetic field is 20,000 times stronger than the Earth's and the composition of the atmosphere is very different. This is the ultimate test of our theory." link