Did you know that there is a mysterious area in space where astronauts are unable to communicate back at the home base? they’re exposed to extreme levels of radiation and their spaceships start to malfunction. its called the “Bermuda Triangle Of Space”. This area has been perplexed by scientists for decades but astronomers may have finally solved this outer space anomaly.
What exactly is the Bermuda triangle of space anyway? well, its official name is the “South Atlantic Anomaly” or the SAA, for short its hovering above the South Atlantic Ocean, stretching from Chile to Zimbabwe. and well this area had a considerably weaker magnetic field then the rest of the Van Allen Radiation Belt. The Van Allen Radiation Belt is a pair of cosmic donut surrounding the Earth.
This is a unique radiation where the belt comes closest to the Earths surface. These belts trap particles that shoot from the sun, which protects the Earth from harmful radiation. The solar radiation within the SAA isn’t held back to the same degree, though. But why?
Well, to explain that first, lets dive into what happens if you wander into this terrifying part of our solar system? The SAA is known for causing electronic malfunction in space ships and extreme radiation exposure for astronauts. It can completely destroy a spacecraft . In 2016, the Japanese satellite ‘Hitomi’ came crashing down to Earth after satellite operators began getting mixed signals from the ship. It was reporting inaccurate data about how it was performing up in space, making people down Earth think that everything was fine, but this was happening as it traveled through the SAA, so operators thought that there was no problem and couldn’t take steps to correct it. The ‘Hubble’ telescope luckily, has managed to avoid any issues while travelling through the SAA. That despite sending a whopping 15% of its time in this space anomaly. To protect the telescope, The Satellite operators power it down. If they didn’t, the SAA could corrupt any precious data which is being collected. But how do astronauts deal with this kind of heavy radiations?
Well, their radiation level is constantly being monitored. So if they end up in the anomaly, they have what its known as a “water wall”. Certain rooms on the ships are filled with huge bags of water. and if you stand behind them, they’ll protect you from the radiation. Water is the best things to shield you from harmful energy, Because of high hydrogen content. Now, if they didn’t have this water wall, they could get sever radiation poisonings or even cancer! So we know the radiation levels are much higher and more dangerous in the specific part of space. But why is this happening?
Well despite, what pictures might show you, Earth isn’t completely round (most of you might know this) it bulges around the center. and because of this the Earths physical center and its magnetic center are slightly off by about 500km. This offset means things like cosmic rays can get closer to the Earths surface near the bulging area. Luckily, the Earths magnetic bubble can still keep all those dangerous rays from getting to us. but that not the case for the people in space above the South Atlantic. Because of this higher radiation levels can reach this point up in space. And what's even more concerning, due to the fact that the magnetic poles here on Earth are constantly changing. The South Atlantic Anomaly keeps growing. Its also gotten weaker by 15%, meaning that radiation in the area has gotten stronger.
So NASA has been carefully monitoring the SAA since 2019. They noticed that the anomaly has been moving west and what's even weirder, the anomaly is also splitting into two. If this continues, it could make things even more worse and complicated, regarding space travel and data collection. But luckily for it to change significantly it would take millions, if not billions of years.
So the Bermuda Triangle Of Space isn’t as mysterious as it sounds, and astronomers are getting better at handling it with every new ship launch and every piece of data recorded.