There are trillions of charged particles – protons and electrons, the basic building blocks of matter – whizzing around above your head at any given time. These high-energy particles, which can travel at close to the speed of light, typically remain thousands of kilometers away from Earth, trapped there by the shape of Earth’s magnetic field.

Occasionally, though, an event happens that can jostle them out of place, sending electrons raining down into Earth’s atmosphere. These high-energy particles in space make up what are known as the Van Allen radiation belts, and their discovery was one of the first of the space age. A new study from my research team has found that electromagnetic waves generated by lightning can trigger these electron showers.

A brief history lesson

At the start of the space race in the 1950s, professor James Van Allen and his research team at the University of Iowa were tasked with building an experiment to fly on the United States’ very first satellite, Explorer 1. They designed sensors to study cosmic radiation, which is caused by high-energy particles originating from the Sun, the Milky Way galaxy, or beyond.

After Explorer 1 launched, though, they noticed that their instrument was detecting significantly higher levels of radiation than expected. Rather than measuring a distant source of radiation beyond our solar system, they appeared to be measuring a local and extremely intense source.

This measurement led to the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts, two doughnut-shaped regions of high-energy electrons and ions encircling the planet.

Scientists believe that the inner radiation belt, peaking about 621 miles (1000 kilometers) from Earth, is composed of electrons and high-energy protons and is relatively stable over time.

The outer radiation belt, about three times farther away, is made up of high-energy electrons. This belt can be highly dynamic. Its location, density and energy content may vary significantly by the hour in response to solar activity.

The discovery of these high-radiation regions is not only an interesting story about the early days of the space race; it also serves as a reminder that many scientific discoveries have come about by happy accident.

It is a lesson for experimental scientists, myself included, to keep an open mind when analyzing and evaluating data. If the data doesn’t match our theories or expectations, those theories may need to be revisited.

Our curious observations

While I teach the history of the space race in a space policy course at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I rarely connect it to my own experience as a scientist researching Earth’s radiation belts. Or, at least, I didn’t until recently.

In a study led by Max Feinland, an undergraduate student in my research group, we stumbled upon some of our own unexpected observations of Earth’s radiation belts. Our findings have made us rethink our understanding of Earth’s inner radiation belt and the processes affecting it.

Originally, we set out to look for very rapid – sub-second – bursts of high-energy electrons entering the atmosphere from the outer radiation belt, where they are typically observed.

Many scientists believe that a type of electromagnetic wave known as “chorus” can knock these electrons out of position and send them toward the atmosphere. They’re called chorus waves due to their distinct chirping sound when listened to on a radio receiver.

Feinland developed an algorithm to search for these events in decades of measurements from the SAMPEX satellite. When he showed me a plot with the location of all the events he’d detected, we noticed a number of them were not where we expected. Some events mapped to the inner radiation belt rather than the outer belt.

This finding was curious for two reasons. For one, chorus waves aren’t prevalent in this region, so something else had to be shaking these electrons loose.

The other surprise was finding electrons this energetic in the inner radiation belt at all. Measurements from NASA’s Van Allen Probes mission prompted renewed interest in the inner radiation belt. Observations from the Van Allen Probes suggested that high-energy electrons are often not present in this inner radiation belt, at least not during the first few years of that mission, from 2012 to 2014.

Our observations now showed that, in fact, there are times that the inner belt contains high-energy electrons. How often this is true and under what conditions remain open questions to explore. These high-energy particles can damage spacecraft and harm humans in space, so researchers need to know when and where in space they are present to better design spacecraft.

Determining the culprit

One of the ways to disturb electrons in the inner radiation belt and kick them into Earth’s atmosphere actually begins in the atmosphere itself.

Lightning, the large electromagnetic discharges that light up the sky during thunderstorms, can actually generate electromagnetic waves known as lightning-generated whistlers.

These waves can then travel through the atmosphere out into space, where they interact with electrons in the inner radiation belt – much as chorus waves interact with electrons in the outer radiation belt.

To test whether lightning was behind our inner radiation belt detections, we looked back at the electron bursts and compared them with thunderstorm data. Some lightning activity seemed correlated with our electron events, but much of it was not.

Specifically, only lightning that occurred right after so-called geomagnetic storms resulted in the bursts of electrons we detected.

Geomagnetic storms are disturbances in the near-Earth space environment often caused by large eruptions on the Sun’s surface. This solar activity, if directed toward Earth, can produce what researchers term space weather. Space weather can result in stunning auroras, but it can also disrupt satellite and power grid operations.

We discovered that a combination of weather on Earth and weather in space produces the unique electron signatures we observed in our study. The solar activity disturbs Earth’s radiation belts and populates the inner belt with very high-energy electrons, then the lightning interacts with these electrons and creates the rapid bursts that we observed.

These results provide a nice reminder of the interconnected nature of Earth and space. They were also a welcome reminder to me of the often nonlinear process of scientific discovery.

Lauren Blum, Assistant Professor of Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As a 30-year cybersecurity veteran, I find the activities of DOGE thus far concerning. Its broad mandate across government, seemingly nonexistent oversight, and the apparent lack of operational competence of its employees have demonstrated that DOGE could create conditions that are ideal for cybersecurity or data privacy incidents that affect the entire nation.

Traditionally, the purpose of cybersecurity is to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of information and information systems while helping keep those systems available to those who need them. But in DOGE’s first few weeks of existence, reports indicate that its staff appears to be ignoring those principles and potentially making the federal government more vulnerable to cyber incidents.

Technical competence

Cybersecurity and information technology, like any other business function, depend on employees trained specifically for their jobs. Just as you wouldn’t let someone only qualified in first aid to perform open heart surgery, technology professionals require a baseline set of credentialed education, training and experience to ensure that the most qualified people are on the job.

Currently, the general public, federal agencies and Congress have little idea who is tinkering with the government’s critical systems. DOGE’s hiring process, including how it screens applicants for technical, operational or cybersecurity competency, as well as experience in government, is opaque. And journalists investigating the backgrounds of DOGE employees have been intimidated by the acting U.S. attorney in Washington.

DOGE has hired young people fresh out of – or still in – college or with little or no experience in government, but who reportedly have strong technical prowess. But some have questionable backgrounds for such sensitive work. And one leading DOGE staffer working at the Treasury Department has since resigned over a series of racist social media posts.

According to reports, these DOGE staffers have been granted administrator-level technical access to a variety of federal systems. These include systems that process all federal payments, including Social Security, Medicare and the congressionally appropriated funds that run the government and its contracting operations.

DOGE operatives are quickly developing and deploying major software changes to very complex old systems and databases, according to reports. But given the speed of change, it’s likely that there is little formal planning or quality control involved to ensure such changes don’t break the system. Such actions run contrary to cybersecurity principles and best practices for technology management.

As a result, there’s probably no way of knowing if these changes make it easier for malware to be introduced into government systems, if sensitive data can be accessed without authorization, or if DOGE’s work is making government systems otherwise more unstable and more vulnerable.

If you don’t know what you’re doing in IT, really bad things can happen. A notable example is the failed launch of the healthcare.gov website in 2013. In the case of the Treasury Department’s systems, that’s fairly important to remember as the nation careens toward another debt-ceiling crisis and citizens look for their Social Security payments.

On Feb. 6, 2025, a federal judge ordered that DOGE staff be restricted to read-only access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems, but the legal proceedings challenging the legality of their access to government IT systems are ongoing.

DOGE email servers

DOGE’s apparent lack of cybersecurity competence is reflected in some of its first actions. DOGE installed its own email servers across the federal government to facilitate direct communication with rank-and-file employees outside official channels, disregarding time-tested best practices for cybersecurity and IT administration. A lawsuit by federal employees alleges that these systems did not undergo a security review as required by current federal cybersecurity standards.

There is an established process in the federal government to configure and deploy new systems to ensure they are stable, secure and unlikely to create cybersecurity problems. But DOGE ignored those practices, with predictable results.

For example, a journalist was able to send invitations to his newsletter to over 13,000 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees through one of these servers. In another case, the way in which employee responses to DOGE’s Fork in the Road buyout offer to federal employees are collected could easily be manipulated by someone with malicious intent – a simple social engineering attack could wrongly end a worker’s employment. And DOGE staff members reportedly are connecting their own untrusted devices to government networks, which potentially introduces new ways for cyberattackers to penetrate sensitive systems.

However, DOGE appears to be embracing creative cybersecurity practices in shielding itself. It’s reorganizing its internal communications in order to dodge Freedom of Information Act requests into its work, and it’s using cybersecurity techniques for tracking insider threats to prevent and investigate leaks of its activities.

Lacking management controls

But it’s not just technical security that DOGE is ignoring. On Feb. 2, two security officials for the U.S. Agency for International Development resisted granting a DOGE team access to sensitive financial and personnel systems until their identities and clearances were verified, in accordance with federal requirements. Instead, the officials were threatened with arrest and placed on administrative leave, and DOGE’s team gained access.

The Trump administration also has reclassified federal chief information officers, normally senior career employees with years of specialized knowledge, to be general employees subject to dismissal for political reasons. So there may well be a brain drain of IT talent in the federal government, or a constant turnover of both senior IT leadership and other technical experts. This change will almost certainly have ramifications for cybersecurity.

DOGE operatives now have direct access to the Office of Personnel Management’s database of millions of federal employees, including those with security clearances holding sensitive positions. Without oversight, this access opens up the possibilities of privacy violations, tampering with employment records, intimidation or political retribution.

Support from all levels of management is crucial to provide accountability for cybersecurity and technology management. This is especially important in the public sector, where oversight and accountability is a critical function of good democratic governance and national security. After all, if people don’t know what you’re doing, they don’t know what you’re doing wrong.

At the moment, DOGE appears to be operating with very little oversight by anyone in position willing or able to hold it responsible for its actions.

Mitigating the damage

Career federal employees trying to follow legal or cybersecurity practices for federal systems and data are now placed in a difficult position. They either capitulate to DOGE staffers’ instructions, thereby abandoning best practices and ignoring federal standards, or resist them and run the risk of being fired or disciplined.

The federal government’s vast collections of data touch every citizen and company. While government systems may not be as trustworthy as they once were, people can still take steps to protect themselves from adverse consequences of DOGE’s activities. Two good starting points are to lock your credit bureau records in case your government data is disclosed and using different logins and passwords on federal websites to conduct business.

It’s crucial for the administration, Congress and the public to recognize the cybersecurity dangers that DOGE’s activities pose and take meaningful steps to bring the organization under reasonable control and oversight.

Richard Forno, Teaching Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and Assistant Director, UMBC Cybersecurity Institute, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Private citizens and companies may one day begin to permanently settle outer space and celestial bodies. But if we don’t enact governing laws in the meantime, space settlers may face legal chaos.

Many wars on Earth start over territorial disputes. In order to avoid such disputes in outer space, nations should consider enacting national laws that specify the extent of each settler’s authority in outer space and provide a process to resolve conflicts.

I have been researching and writing about space law for over 40 years. Through my work, I’ve studied ways to avoid war and resolve disputes in space.

Property in space

Space is an international area, and companies and individuals are free to land their space objects – including satellites, human-crewed and robotic spacecraft and human-inhabited facilities – on celestial bodies and conduct operations anywhere they please. This includes both outer space and celestial bodies such as the Moon.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits territorial claims in outer space and on celestial bodies in order to avoid disputes. But without national laws governing space settlers, a nation might attempt to protect its citizens’ and companies’ interests by withdrawing from the treaty. They could then claim the territory where its citizens have placed their space objects.

Nations enforce territorial claims through military force, which would likely cost money and lives. An alternative to territorial claims, which I’ve been investigating and have come to prefer, would be to enact real property rights that are consistent with the Outer Space Treaty.

Territorial claims can be asserted only by national governments, while property rights apply to private citizens, companies and national governments that own property. A property rights law could specify how much authority settlers have and protect their investments in outer space and on celestial bodies.

The Outer Space Treaty

In 1967, the Outer Space Treaty went into effect. As of January 2025, 115 countries are party to this treaty, including the United States and most nations that have a space program.

The Outer Space Treaty outlines principles for the peaceful exploration and use of outer space and celestial bodies. However, the treaty does not specify how it will apply to the citizens and companies of nations that are parties to the treaty.

For this reason, the Outer Space Treaty is largely not a self-executing treaty. This means U.S. courts cannot apply the terms of the treaty to individual citizens and companies. For that to happen, the United States would need to enact national legislation that explains how the terms of the treaty apply to nongovernmental entities.

One article of the Outer Space Treaty says that participating countries should make sure that all of their citizens’ space activities comply with the treaty’s terms. Another article then gives these nations the authority to enact laws governing their citizens’ and companies’ private space activities.

This is particularly relevant to the U.S., where commercial activity in space is rapidly increasing.

UN Charter

It is important to note that the Outer Space Treaty requires participating nations to comply with international law and the United Nations Charter.

In the U.N. Charter, there are two international law concepts that are relevant to property rights. One is a country’s right to defend itself, and the other is the noninterference principle.

The international law principle of noninterference gives nations the right to exclude others from their space objects and the areas where they have ongoing activity.

But how will nations apply this concept to their private citizens and companies? Do individual people and companies have the right to exclude others in order to prevent interference with their activities? What can they do if a foreign person interferes or causes damage?

The noninterference principle in the U.N. Charter governs relations between nations, not individuals. Consequently, U.S. courts likely wouldn’t enforce the noninterference principle in a case involving two private parties.

So, U.S. citizens and companies do not have the right to exclude others from their space objects and areas of ongoing activity unless the U.S. enacts legislation giving them that right.

US laws and regulations

The United States has recognized the need for more specific laws to govern private space activities. It has sought international support for this effort through the nonbinding Artemis Accords.

As of January 2025, 50 nations have signed the Artemis Accords.

The accords explain how important components of the Outer Space Treaty will apply to private space activities. One section of the accords allows for safety zones, where public and private personnel, equipment and operations are protected from harmful interference by other people. The rights to self-defense and noninterference from the U.N. Charter provide a legal basis for safety zones.

Aside from satellite and rocket-launch regulations, the United States has enacted only a few laws – including the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 – to govern private activities in outer space and on celestial bodies.

As part of this act, any U.S. citizen collecting mineral resources in outer space or on celestial bodies has a right to own, transport, use and sell those resources. This act is an example of national legislation that clarifies how the Outer Space Treaty applies to U.S. citizens and companies.

Property rights

Enacting property rights for outer space would make it clear what rights and obligations property owners have and the extent of their authority over their property.

All nations on Earth have a form of property rights in their legal systems. Property rights typically include the rights to possess, control, develop, exclude, enjoy, sell, lease and mortgage properties. Enacting real property rights in space would create a marketplace for buying, selling, renting and mortgaging property.

Because the Outer Space Treaty prohibits territorial claims, space property rights would not necessarily be “land grabs.” Property rights would operate a little differently in space than on Earth.

Property rights in space would have to be based on the authority that the Outer Space Treaty gives to nations. This authority allows them to govern their citizens and their assets by enacting laws and enforcing them in their courts.

Space property rights would include safety zones around property to prevent interference. So, people would have to get the property owner’s permission before entering a safety zone.

If a U.S. property owner were to sell a space property to a foreign citizen or company, the space objects on the property would have to stay on the property or be replaced with the purchaser’s space objects. That would ensure that the owner’s country still has authority over the property.

Also, if someone transferred their space objects to a foreign citizen or company, the buyer would have to change their objects’ international registration, which would give the buyer’s nation authority over the space objects and the surrounding property.

Nations could likely avoid some territorial disputes if they enact real property laws in space that clearly describe how national authority over property changes when it is sold. Enacting property rights could reduce the legal risks for commercial space companies and support the permanent settlement of outer space and celestial bodies.

U.S. property rights law could also contain a reciprocity provision, which would encourage other nations to pass similar laws and allow participating countries to mutually recognize each other’s property rights.

With a reciprocity provision, property rights could support economic development as commercial companies around the world begin to look to outer space as the next big area of economic growth.

Wayne N White Jr, Adjunct Professor of Aviation and Space Law, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.