In 2017, NASA space explorations discovered a huge, man-made ‘barrier’ around the Earth.
Experiments have confirmed that it actually has an impact on space weather beyond our planet’s atmosphere.
That means we are not changing the Earth so drastically, scientists are calling a new geological era by our name – our actions are changing space as well.
But the good news is that, unlike our influence on the planet, that dangerous bubble we created in space is actually working in our favor.
In 2012, NASA introduced two space probes to interact with each other while whistling at 3,200 km / h (2,000 mph) through the Earth’s Van Allen belts.
Our planet is surrounded by two such radiation belts (and a temporary third) – the inner belt extends approximately 640 to 9,600 km (400 to 6,000 miles) above the Earth’s surface, while the outer belt is approximately 13,500 to 58,000 km high (8,400 to 36,000 miles). .
In 2017, Van Allen Probe observed something strange while observing the activity of charged particles trapped within the Earth’s magnetic field – these dangerous solar discharges are placed in the Gulf by some kind of low frequency barrier.
When researchers investigated, they found that the barrier had been pushing the Van Allen belts away from the Earth for the past few decades, and now the lower limits of radiation streams are actually farther away from us than they were in the 1960s.
So what has changed?
A particular type of low-frequency (VLF) radio communications is now more common than it was in the 1960s, and the team at NASA confirmed that certain particles in space can affect how and where they move.
In other words, thanks to the VLF, we now have anthropological (or man-made) space weather.
“Under the right conditions, many experiments and observations have found that radio communication signals in the VLF frequency range can actually affect the properties of the high-energy radiation environment around the Earth,” said Bill, a member of the team from the MIT Haston Lab in Massachusetts.
Most of us have little contact with VLF signals in our daily lives, but they are an important part of many engineering, scientific and military activities.
At frequencies ranging from 3 to 30 kHz, they are too weak to carry audio transmissions, but they are perfect for transmitting encoded messages over long distances or deep underwater.
One of the most common uses of VLF signals is to communicate with deep-sea submarines, but because their large wavelengths vary around large obstacles, such as mountain ranges, they are also used to achieve dispersions over tricky terrain.
VLF signals have never been intended to go anywhere other than Earth, but they have been leaking into space around our planet, and have lasted a long time to form a giant security bubble.
When Van Allen Props compared the location of the VLF bubble to the boundaries of Earth’s radiation belts, he initially saw an interesting coincidence – “the outer size of the VLF bubble is almost identical to the inner edge of the Van Allen radiation belts,” NASA said.
But as soon as they realized that VLF signals could actually affect the movement of charged particles inside these radiation belts, they realized that our accidental man-made barrier was gradually pushing them back.
One member of the team, Dan Baker, of the University of Colorado Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, described it as an “impossible obstacle.”
While our defense VLF bubble is one of the greatest influences humans have made on the space around our planet, it is certainly not one – we have been making our mark in space since the 19th century, especially in the last 50 years. When all of the nuclear explosions erupted.
“These explosions created artificial radiation belts near the Earth, which caused extensive damage to many satellites,” the NASA team explained.
“Other anthropological impacts on the space environment include chemical release experiments, high frequency wave heat of the ionosphere and the interaction of VLF waves with radiation belts.”
Astronomer Carl Sagan once wanted to find clear signs of life on Earth from space – it turns out, if you know where to look there is a bunch of them.
Research published Scientific Space Reviews.
The version of this story was first released in May 2017.