The atmosphere is swelling

The thermosphere is warming up and this time it is not the fault of humans, it also has nothing to do with climate change or global warming, the thermosphere is a layer of the earth's atmosphere, it begins approximately between 80 to 120 kilometers high from the earth and extends up to 500 or 1000 km from the earth's surface.

It is a part of the Earth's atmosphere but, there the gas molecules are very dispersed, there are very few, at that distance, in that area is the low Earth orbit where the vast majority of space satellites are, including both Chinese space stations like the international space station.

Satellites and ships have no problems navigating in that area, at that distance because, as I already said, the number of atmospheric gas molecules that exist are very few, so there is no friction or friction with them is minimal, within that layer. we have a lot of ultraviolet radiation and especially a lot of Gamma rays and x-rays from the Sun and cosmic rays, all of this causes the ionization of the atoms of the molecules that are there, in this process the gases that compose it raise their temperature to several hundred degrees, hence its name, is an area where, in principle, those loose molecules are quite hot.

There is a problem that is worrying the experts and that is that this year the Sun is being especially active, there is a series of geomagnetic storms in 2023 that have bombarded the Earth's upper atmosphere with terawatts of energy and this has helped to raise its temperature What is worse, it has also helped to raise the height of atmospheric gases, to a level that has not been known for 20 years.

Simply put, solar storms fill the upper part of the Earth's atmosphere with energy, the gases that form it swell, heat up like any other normal phenomenon and when these gases swell they reach higher altitudes, with which space satellites end up colliding or rubbing against a greater number of molecules in the atmosphere and that friction can end up knocking them down, that is what happened to 40 satellites of the Starlink company that of Elon musk in February of last year, a solar storm in the chola atmosphere and the satellites began to brush with the air, lost speed and ended up falling to the ground.

It was not a strong storm, there were 40 but if the current situation continues to progress we could see a veritable rain of hundreds of satellites knocked down by an atmosphere that has swelled and has risen up to the height where these satellites are, causing them to rub more amount of molecules in the atmosphere and therefore slowing down their speed and causing them to fall, this would alter our communications, GPS and a multitude of technological services on which we currently depend.