There's a Human-Made Barrier in Space, Surrounding The Entire Earth

 In 2017, NASA space probes detected a large, human-made 'barrier' surrounding Earth.

And tests have confirmed that it's actually having sway on space weather far beyond our planet's atmosphere.

That means we're not just changing Earth so severely, scientists are calling for an entirely new geological epoch to be named after us - our activities are changing space too.

But the great news is that unlike our influence on the world itself, that humungous bubble we created come in space is truly working in our favor.

Back in 2012, NASA launched two space probes to figure in tandem with one another as they whizzed through Earth's James Alfred Van Allen Belts at speeds of around 3,200 km/h (2,000 mph). 

Our planet is surrounded by two such radiation belts (and a short-lived third one) - the inner belt stretches from around 640 to 9,600 km (400 to six,000 miles) above Earth's surface, while the outer belt occupies an altitude of roughly 13,500 to 58,000 km (8,400 to 36,000 miles).

In 2017, the James Alfred Van Allen Probes detected something strange as they monitored the activity of charged particles caught within Earth's magnetic flux - these dangerous solar discharges were being kept cornered by some reasonably low-frequency barrier.

When researchers investigated, they found that this barrier had been actively pushing the Van Allen Belts faraway from Earth over the past few decades, and now the lower limits of the radiation streams are literally further faraway from us than they were within the 1960s.

So what's changed? 

A certain style of transmission called very low frequency (VLF) radio communications, became way more common now than within the 60s, and also the team at NASA confirmed that they'll influence how and where certain particles in space move about.

In other words, due to VLF, we now have anthropogenic (or human-made) space weather.

"A number of experiments and observations have found out that, under the proper conditions, radio communications signals within the VLF frequency range can, of course, affect the properties of the high-energy radiation environment around the Earth," said one amongst the team, Phil Erickson from the MIT Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts, back in 2017.

Most people won't have much to try and do with VLF signals in our daily life, but they are a mainstay in many engineering, scientific, and military operations.

With frequencies between 3 and 30 kilohertz, they're far too weak to hold audio transmissions, but they're perfect for broadcasting coded messages across long-distances or deep underwater.

One of the foremost common uses of VLF signals is to speak with deep-sea submarines, but because their large wavelengths can diffract around large obstacles like mountain ranges, they're also accustomed achieve transmissions across tricky terrain.

It was never the intention for VLF signals to travel anywhere aside from on Earth, but it seems they have been leaking into the space surrounding our planet, and have lingered long enough to make a large protective bubble.

When the James Alfred Van Allen Probes compared the situation of the VLF bubble to the bounds of Earth's radiation belts, they found what initially gave the impression of a remarkable coincidence - "The outward extent of the VLF bubble corresponds almost exactly to the inner fringe of the Van Allen radiation belts," said NASA.

But once they realized that VLF signals can actually influence the movement of the charged particles within these radiation belts, they realized that our unintentional human-made barrier has been progressively pushing them back.

One of the team, Dan Baker, from the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, stated this because of the "impenetrable barrier".

While our protective VLF bubble is maybe the simplest influence we humans have made on the space surrounding our planet, it's on no account the sole one - we've been making our mark on space since the 19th century, and particularly over the past 50 years, when nuclear explosions were all the fad.

"These explosions created artificial radiation belts near Earth that resulted in major damages to many satellites," the NASA team explained.

"Other anthropogenic impacts on the space environment include chemical release experiments, high-frequency wave heating of the ionosphere and therefore the interaction of VLF waves with the radiation belts."

Astronomer Carl Sagan once wanted to search out unequivocal indications of life on Earth from up in space - seems, there are a bunch of them if you recognize where to appear.