Remember the big solar storm back in May 2024? The one that caused auroras as far south as Florida and Mexico? Scientists are still parsing out the impacts that storm had on the local environment, and a new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters by Yoshizumi Miyoshi of Nagoya University and his co-authors shows it might have allowed some nearby electrons to accelerate to relativistic speeds using something called a chorus wave.

To understand why that’s important, let’s first take a look at Earth’s local radiation environment. It’s dominated by what scientists call the Van Allen belts. These were discovered early on in the Space Age by Explorer 1, and they are Earth’s primary defense against high energy electrons and other ions spewed out by the Sun.…