More than 50 years after the United States's first satellite, Explorer 1, discovered two donuts of radiation stacked over Earth's equator, a pair of NASA satellites has stunned space physicists with the discovery of a third Van Allen radiation belt (albeit a temporary one). Theorists did not see it coming, and none of the instrumented satellites flying since the 1958 discovery could reveal the new belt's highly energetic charged subatomic particles zipping about at near the speed of light.
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