{"id":137508,"date":"2022-03-30T17:48:41","date_gmt":"2022-03-30T22:48:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/03\/researchers-discover-source-of-super-fast-electron-rain"},"modified":"2022-03-30T17:48:41","modified_gmt":"2022-03-30T22:48:41","slug":"researchers-discover-source-of-super-fast-electron-rain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/03\/researchers-discover-source-of-super-fast-electron-rain","title":{"rendered":"Researchers discover source of super-fast electron rain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/researchers-discover-source-of-super-fast-electron-rain2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>UCLA scientists have discovered a new source of super-fast, energetic electrons raining down on Earth, a phenomenon that contributes to the colorful aurora borealis but also poses hazards to satellites, spacecraft and astronauts.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers observed unexpected, rapid \u201celectron precipitation\u201d from low-Earth orbit using the ELFIN mission, a pair of tiny satellites built and operated on the UCLA campus by undergraduate and graduate students guided by a small team of staff mentors.<\/p>\n<p>By combining the ELFIN data with more distant observations from NASA\u2019s THEMIS spacecraft, the scientists determined that the sudden downpour was caused by whistler waves, a type of electromagnetic wave that ripples through plasma in <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/space\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">space<\/a> and affects electrons in the Earth\u2019s magnetosphere, causing them to \u201cspill over\u201d into the atmosphere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>UCLA scientists have discovered a new source of super-fast, energetic electrons raining down on Earth, a phenomenon that contributes to the colorful aurora borealis but also poses hazards to satellites, spacecraft and astronauts. The researchers observed unexpected, rapid \u201celectron precipitation\u201d from low-Earth orbit using the ELFIN mission, a pair of tiny satellites built and operated [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2028],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-satellites"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137508\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}