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Chorus waves can produce high-energy \u201ckiller electrons\u201d that can damage satellites. Scientists have detected something strange in Earth\u2019s magnetosphere, some 100,000 miles away<\/a> from the ground. Split-second bursts of energy known as chorus waves were found \u201cchirping\u201d in an area where they\u2019ve never been seen before, baffling researchers.<\/p>\n To be clear, there\u2019s no actual chirping being heard in space, since space is a vacuum that doesn\u2019t transmit sound. Chorus waves, instead, earned their name because they sound like birdsong when converted to audio signals. They\u2019ve been picked up since the late 1960s at the Halley Research Station in Antarctica. NASA has also detected<\/a> the waves with its Van Allen Probes<\/a>, which measure the radiation belts<\/a> surrounding our planet.<\/p>\n Until now, these waves were observed to occur close to Earth, around 32,000 miles away<\/a>. But using NASA\u2019s Magnetospheric Multiscale<\/a> mission, researchers found chorus waves at much more distant locations, placing them in an area that challenges the existing theory on how these perturbations are produced. The findings were published in the journal\u00a0Nature<\/a><\/em> in January.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a very important paper,\u201d says study co-author James Burch<\/a> of the Southwest Research Institute to Jonathan O\u2019Callaghan at Scientific American<\/a><\/em>. \u201cThis could be occurring anywhere in the universe where there\u2019s a magnetic field, which is just about everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n Michael Dunning via Getty Images<\/span>
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