The News Of Tomorrow, Today
The News Of Tomorrow, Today
Electrons
George Dvorsky
A NASA-led study of the Van Allen radiation belts has uncovered new information about the invisible “shield” that keeps harmful ultrarelativistic electrons from the Earth. Just last year, the probes reported the existence of a new, previously-unknown third belt thousands of kilometres above the Earth.
Last week, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics published the most exact value ever observed for the weight of a single electron — a value 13 times more accurate than the previous estimate. And the Penning trap, the kooky looking device shown above, was crucial in obtaining…
Until now, electrons have been regarded as elementary particles — which means that scientists thought they had no component parts or substructure. But, for the first time, electrons have been observed decaying into two separate parts — causing physicists to rethink what they know about the particles.
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