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NASA Van Allen Probes Discover Particle Accelerator in Earth's Radiation Belts (scienceworldreport.com)
2 points by mayanksinghal on July 28, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment


I'm glad to see NASA astrophysicists are finally catching up with what plasma physicists have known since 1903 when Kristian Birkeland predicted exactly this. This phenomenon is known as "Birkeland Currents" (http://www.plasma-universe.com/Birkeland_current). Now if they would only stop using improper terminology such as "solar wind", "magnetic reconnection" and "frozen magnetic fields" and maybe even read actual plasma physics papers about the many years of real-life lab experiments that have shown the existence of this exact phenomenon.




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