Jackson Pollock's frenetic drip paintings and Mark Rothko's hazy colour fields have spent decades as rivals in the gallery. Now a team of physicists says the stylistic gap between the two Abstract Expressionists captures something about space that spacecraft have been getting wrong for 60 years.

A study published in July in the journal Physical Review Research by a team at the International Space Science Institute (ISSI) in Bern argues that high-energy particles in Earth's radiation belt — the bands of charged particles trapped by the planet's magnetic field — do not spread in the slow, random process called diffusion that scientists have assumed since the first satellite images of the 1960s. Instead, the researchers say, groups of particles form increasingly complex, structured patterns as they drift through the belts. The diffusion view, they argue, is a misunderstanding created by the limited vantage point of orbiting spacecraft, whose instruments smooth out fine detail the way a low-resolution camera flattens texture.

The analogy is where the paintings come in. The team presents Pollock's all-over drip canvases as a stand-in for what the particle structures actually look like up close: chaotic, dense, every square centimetre packed with incident. Rothko's soft-edged, floating fields of colour represent what a blunt-instrument spacecraft sees instead — a smeared, apparently uniform glow with the fine structure washed out.

Co-authors Oliver Allanson of the University of Birmingham and Miroslav Hanzelka of the Czech Academy of Sciences led the work, which was conducted under an ISSI team programme. According to Artnet News, the study used the art comparison to make a technical argument about how instruments with limited resolution can miss complex particle structures and instead perceive a smooth, diffuse distribution.

The stakes extend beyond Earth. Radiation belts also surround Saturn and Jupiter, and even ultracool brown dwarfs — objects too small to ignite as stars. Closer to home, the belts can damage satellites and endanger astronauts, so understanding how particles actually move through them matters for mission planning and spacecraft design.

For six decades the textbook picture has been one of gradual, random spreading. If the ISSI team is right, the real picture is closer to a Pollock: structured, intricate, and hidden in plain sight behind the blur of a Rothko-coloured instrument.