Scientists say that we are moving towards a new era - human activity is already so high that we have begun to change even the cosmos. NASA space probes launched into orbit have determined the presence of a kind of huge man-made "barrier" surrounding our Earth. Studies of the barrier show that it spreads far beyond our planet's atmosphere, affecting space weather. The good news is that, unlike our influence on the planet itself, the giant "bubble" that we created in space is actually working in our favor.
In 2012, the American space agency NASA launched two space probes. Working in tandem, they study the Van Allen radiation belts. Our planet is surrounded by two such radiation belts (and one temporary). The inner belt stretches to a height of 640 to 9600 kilometers above the Earth's surface, while the outer one is located at an altitude of 13,500-58,000 kilometers.
Recently, NASA probes observing the behavior of highly charged particles captured by the Earth's magnetic field discovered something strange - a kind of low-frequency barrier that holds, like a vice, dangerous solar particles and prevents them from moving further. Scientists decided to conduct a deeper analysis of the phenomenon and found that this barrier has actually been actively pushing the Van Alen belts away from the Earth over the past decades, and now the lower limits of the cosmic radiation boundary are much farther from the planet's surface than it was in the 1960s. …
Effects
A certain type of communication called very low radio frequency (VLF) has become very common lately. They are used much more actively than in the same 60s. At the same time, NASA says that VLFs are able to influence the behavior and movement of cosmic particles. And according to the aerospace agency, with the help of these very VLFs, we got anthropogenic (that is, man-made) space near-Earth weather.
"A number of experiments and observations have shown that, under the right conditions, radio communications signals transmitted through VLF frequencies can affect the properties of the near-Earth environment of highly charged radiation," says Phil Erickson of the Highstack Observatory in Massachusetts, USA.
Most of us never encounter VLF signals, but they are very actively used in engineering, scientific and military operations. Since their range is only 3 to 30 kHz, it is impossible to use them to transmit audio messages - they are too weak. However, they are great for transmitting encoded messages over long distances or great depths, so they are very often used for communication with submarines. Their wavelength allows them to bend around large obstacles, so they are often used where very difficult terrain.
Initially, scientists did not even suspect that VLF signals are capable of breaking out of the atmosphere, but, as it turned out, they still succeeded, and, moreover, they are capable of creating a huge protective background. And this was confirmed by the Van Allen probes, which compared the position of the VLF-frequency “bubble” with the boundaries of the Earth's radiation belts.
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"The size of the bubble exactly matches the inner boundaries of the Van Allen belt," says NASA.
Once scientists figured out that VLF signals could influence the movement of charged particles within these belts, they realized that, in fact, a human-made barrier actively pushes these belts away from the planet.
While the VLF bubble is arguably the best example of the positive impact of humanity on near-Earth space at this time, it is definitely not the only example of the impact itself. In fact, we have been influencing the outer space around us since the 19th century, and special activity on our part has occurred over the past 50 years, which have witnessed numerous tests of nuclear explosions.
“These explosions created artificial radiation belts near the Earth, which later even caused damage to several artificial satellites. Other anthropogenic impacts on the space environment include various experiments on the release of chemical reagents, heating the ionosphere by high-frequency waves, as well as the interaction of VLF waves with the planet's natural radiation belts,”the NASA report says.
As we already wrote in one of the previous articles, at one time the famous American astronomer Carl Sagan wanted to find traces of the presence of life on our planet from space. Taking into account such man-made signs could make it easier to find intelligent life on other planets.
NIKOLAY KHIZHNYAK