Researchers have made a revolutionary discovery of a particle that could play a major role in off-setting climate change.

They are called Criegee intermediates, or Criegee biradicals, named after the German chemist Rudolf Criegee, and are short-lived molecules that form in the Earth's atmosphere when ozone reacts with alkenes.

The potential of the Criegee biradical to "cool the planet" was discovered by researchers from the University of Manchester, the University of Bristol and Sandia National Laboratories.

These invisible chemical intermediates are powerful oxidisers of pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide, produced by combustion. Researchers said the Criegee biradicals can naturally clean up the atmosphere.

While scientists have known about the intermediates since the 1950s, they haven't been able to directly measure how the molecules react with other atmospheric compounds, such as the pollutants nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide, until recently.

The detection of the Criegee biradical and measurement of how fast it reacts was made possible by a unique apparatus that uses light from a third-generation synchrotron facility, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source.

Researchers found that the Criegee biradicals react more rapidly than previously assumed and will accelerate the formation of sulphate and nitrate in the atmosphere. These compounds will lead to aerosol formation and ultimately to cloud formation with the potential to cool the planet.

Since 90 percent of the alkenes in the atmosphere that produce these intermediates come from Earth's ecosystems, the results suggest that "the ecosystem is negating climate change more efficiently than we thought it was," said study co-author Carl Percival, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.

"The most important message here is that we need to protect the ecosystems we have left," Percival said in a breakthrough paper published in Science.