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Plasma Clouds
Encircling the equatorial region of the Earth, and extending to latitudes nearly as far as the Arctic Circle, are regions of space where powerful flows of particles exist. Since the late 1950s at the dawn of the Space Age, they have been called the Van Allen belts. They were at one time believed to be particles from the solar wind, trapped by the Earth's magnetic field.
There are actually two belts which are shaped like two nested donuts centered on
the Earth. The inner belt contains 10 million-
There are two other important systems of particles that invisibly orbit the Earth: the plasmasphere and the ring current. Both of these systems contain much lower energy particles than the Van Allen belts, although they occupy nearly the same regions of space extending to at least 45,000 kilometers from the Earth's surface.
Low-
During times of severe coronal mass ejections, atoms from the Earth's atmosphere
are actually pumped into the plasmasphere in a so-
The ring current extends from 8,000 kilometers to nearly 30,000 kilometers from the
surface and occupies nearly the same zone as the much more energetic Van Allen belts.
Ring current particles carry energies of thousands of volts. It is not a complete
equatorial ring, like the planet Saturn's rings, but is only at its strongest on
the night-
Source:NASA
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