As explained in the video above, NASA now believes Earth has been unintentionally shielded from electromagnetic space weather by a certain type of radio wave we’ve been using, essentially creating a manmade border around the planet. That weather, mostly from our sun, can wreak havoc on our technology.
It turns out that very low-frequency waves, or VLF, we use for communicating with submarines don’t just go deep down under the water—they also spill out into space. Interacting with particles there, they form a barrier that NASA’s Van Allen probes can see.
NASA now plans to experiment to see what we can do with VLFs on purpose.
