The great solar storm of May 2024, which sparked beautiful auroral displays over much of the world, also created two new radiation belts that were observed with a satellite that came back from the dead.

“This is really stunning,” Xinlin Li, a professor at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said in a statement. “When we compared the data from before and after the storm, I said, ‘Wow, this is something really new’.”