Did Humans Accidentally Create an Artificial Barrier Around Earth?

Last month, NASA’s Van Allen probes (which are designed to study electrons and ions in space) reported that there is actually an artificial barrier surrounding Earth created by none other than human beings.

How was this barrier made? This artificial barrier was the result of low frequency radio communications created by human activity. Very low frequency signals, or VLF, are often emitted by radio telescopes that have the task of contacting submarines in the ocean.  But while most of the signals are sent down into the deep, dark waters, some signals also float into the atmosphere, resulting in something called a VLF bubble that surrounds the earth. The VLF bubble extends all the way to the inner edge of the Van Allen radiation belts, 3 belts that have energetic charged particles held by Earth’s magnetic field. The interaction between the VLF bubble and the radiation belts results in the artificial barrier that we’re talking about.

Two doughnut-shaped regions of high-energy particles make up the Van Allen radiation belts. Credit: NASA

Phil Erickson, one of the scientists involved in the discovery, said: “A number of experiments and observations have figured out that, under the right conditions, radio communications signals in the VLF frequency range can in fact affect the properties of the high-energy radiation environment around the Earth”.

In fact, if the VLF bubble didn’t exist, then we would be much closer to the radiation belt than we currently are. As shown in data from the 1960s, the Van Allen radiation belt was actually much closer to Earth back then than it is right now. This means that the barrier is actually protecting the earth from space radiation. Not only that, scientists also say that this barrier will be able to shield space from other dangers like coronal mass ejections, which are explosions that occur on the sun that may result in geomagnetic storms that can destroy communication satellites and power grids as well as affect the weather in space.

Scientists are now saying that the barrier could also potentially remove excess radiation around earth and are carrying out experiments as we speak. This newfound artificial barrier proves that we, as human beings, not only have a huge impact on the earth, but also in space as well.

Alien Megastructure Star On the Move Again

KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby’s Star

Moving away from man-made barriers and onto the topic of aliens. Yes, it just gets weirder and weirder.

A report today has announced that one of the strangest stars in the universe, the KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby’s Star, has started behaving very strangely again.This star, nicknamed the ‘alien megastructure star’, was originally discovered in 2009 and is located 1,500 light years away from earth between the Cygnus and Lyre constellations of our Milky Way galaxy. The reason why this star is called the ‘alien megastructure star’ is because in late 2015, astronomers led by Tabetha Boyajian (AKA Tabby, the woman the KIC 8462852 is named after) of Yale University discovered that the star was emitting light in very strange patterns.

To give a little background info: stars usually emit light in very slight dips of less than 1 percent every few weeks, days, or months. But to the astronomers’ surprise,  KIC 8462852 was emitting light dips of up to 22 percent! And the strange thing was that the light dips didn’t follow a particular pattern either, which left astronomers and scientists completely baffled. No one had a clue what was going on, and could think of no explanations as to why the star was behaving the way it was. As a result, one scientist offered the possibility that an 'alien megastructure' was messing with the star, which is how it got it’s nickname ‘alien megastructure star’.

According to Jason Wright, Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State, the star started dimming again last Friday, and has already dimmed by 3 percent in the matter of a few days. He immediately tweeted about the phenomenon on Twitter, which caused everyone in the astronomical community to freak out and run for their telescopes.  "As far as I can tell, every telescope that can look at it right now is looking at it right now," says astronomer Matt Muterspaugh from Tennessee State University.

The reason why this second dimming of the KIC  8462852 is so important is because it allows scientists to gather more data about its bizarre dip patterns. During the last dipping in 2015, astronomers were not able to collect enough data to provide reasonable explanations about the strange star’s light patterns. "We were kind of stuck in a spot where we couldn't do anything," Tabetha Boyajian said: "We had all the data we could, and to learn anything more, we needed to catch it in action again."

Some explanations surrounding the star’s bizarreness include comet swarms, the remnants of a devoured planet, or that the star is actually distorted in a way that gives it a bigger radius at the equator than at the poles. Of course, people are even considering the possibility of alien intervention. In fact, this star is one of the few phenomena where no one has even discounted the aliens yet….That’s how weird it is.

Jason Wright even said that: "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilisation to build." in fact, Wright believes that the star’s irregular light emission is caused by something like the Dyson sphere we see in sci-fi movies, a huge sphere created around a star that surrounds it and absorbs all of the energy output of the star so that lifeforms can live on the star’s surface.

Even someone like Wright, a professional astronomer with a solid background who considers aliens as the LAST possible explanation, believes that alien intervention is a very likely explanation for the star’s weird behavior. Regarding Wright’s theory about the Dyson sphere, Matt Muterspaugh says: "That theory is still a valid one...we would really hate to go to that, because that's a pretty major thing. It'd be awesome of course, but as scientists, we're hoping there's a natural explanation."

So what do you guys think? Do you think aliens actually built a huge Dyson sphere around the KIC  8462852 so that more aliens can live on the star’s surface?