Typically when we think of radiation, we might picture mutated monsters or the fate of poor Marie Curie, the pioneering scientist and two-time Nobel prize laureate who died from her research into the effects of ionizing radiation. But there is a delightful band of radiation that surrounds the Earth, created courtesy of Earth's magnetic field, which repels some pretty nasty particles from space. Without it, life on this little planet would likely have a harder time surviving (indeed, some astrobiologists say life might not exist on Earth at all if not for the protective presence of our magnetic field).
Now, for the first time, scientists have detected such a radiation zone in another solar system. Other planets in our neighborhood, including Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus also have these donut-shaped radiation belts, which can stretch out farther than 10 times a planet's radius. But this is the first time one has been spotted elsewhere in the universe. The research was published this week in the journal Nature.
