As the US cellular and telecommunications network crashed today those in the know are asking the question, was two X-class flares responsible. . . And it wasn't just cellular networks—Banks, Google and other internet providers, Elon Musk's Starlink, social media—X, Facebook, Microsoft, Instagram, Amazon, GMail, all having serious issues all at the same time—Just after this morning's powerful flare.
The broad scope of outages rules out the chance of mass hacking. More likely, the solar impact on our magnetosphere became amplified as our magnetic field weakened.
NOAA has claimed today that the outages probably had nothing to do with the solar flares. A US cyber official tracking the AT&T outage told CNN there has so far been no indication that the outage was caused by malicious cyber activity, but the investigation is ongoing. Spaceweather.com confirmed that saying: While solar flares can affect communication systems, it is highly unlikely that these two X-flares contributed to today's widely reported cell phone outages. The flares, while intense, did not cause a solar radiation storm. Moreover, the shortwave radio blackouts they did cause were too brief and too low in frequency to interfere with most cell phone communications.
However, a new paper has just been released by S. Solter-Hunt revealing the dangers of the skyrocketing (pardon the pun) increase in satellite traffic orbiting planet Earth.
Potential Perturbation of the Ionosphere by Megaconstellations and Corresponding Artificial Re-entry Plasma Dust.
According to S Solter-Hunt, anything from 500,000 to 1 million satellites are expected to be launched in the next decades, primarily to build internet constellations called mega-constellations. These mega-constellations are disposable and will constantly re-enter and be replaced, however, they will create a layer of conductive particulate. The mass of conductive particles (electrified artificial plasma) left behind from the worldwide distribution of re-entry satellites is already billions of times greater than the mass of the Van Allen Belts. The Van Allen radiation belt is a zone of energetically charged particles, most of which originate from the solar wind, that are captured by and held around our planet by the magnetosphere and protects us from the Sun's powerful radiation.
"The mass of a second generation Starlink satellite is 1250 kilograms, all of which will become conductive debris when the satellite is eventually de-orbited," says Solter. Metal debris from a "single" deorbited Starlink satellite is 7 million times more massive than the Van Allen Belts. An entire mega constellation, which these satellites will form is billions of times bigger. These ratios point to a big problem.
"The space industry is adding enormous amounts of material to the magnetosphere in comparison to natural levels of particulate matter," says Solter. "Due to the conductive nature of the satellite debris, (electrified artificial plasma) this may perturb or change things." There is already evidence of this process in action. A 2023 study by researchers using a high-altitude NASA aircraft found that 10% of aerosols in the stratosphere contain aluminium and other metals from disintegrating satellites and rocket stages. These particles drift down from "the ablation zone" 70 to 80 km above the Earth's surface where meteors and satellites burn up.
Our Already Weakening Magnetic Field Is About To Be Compromised!
Solter worries that satellite debris could weaken Earth's already vulnerable magnetic field--the same magnetic field that protects us from cosmic rays and solar storms. "It's a textbook undergraduate physics problem," she explains. "Suppose you put a conductive shell (satellite debris) around a spherical magnet (Earth). Outside the shell, the magnetic field goes to zero due to shielding effects. Solter's preliminary study appears to show that the space industry is indeed anxious for the environment. "It is very concerning," she concludes. "We absolutely cannot dump endless amounts of conductive dust into the magnetosphere and not expect some kind of impact. Multidisciplinary studies of this pollution are urgently needed.". . . Full PDF file here
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