Around midnight, some of Mumbai and Pune's radio stations were on each other's airwaves; meteor shower or solar activity suspected to have caused this anomaly
Illustration/Uday Mohite
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If you had tuned into the radio around midnight on Thursday, you would have caught some Pune stations on the airwaves.
Usually, even if Pune stations do catch a network in Mumbai, it is weak and crackling. But on Thursday, the signal was crystal clear.
2-3 stations heard
"I could hear two to three stations from Pune loud and clear," said Arvind Paranjpye, director of Nehru Planetarium.
Paranjpye, who visits Pune frequently, has all radio stations’ frequencies (from both cities) pre-set on his phone. He was, therefore, surprised when he was able to hear one his favourite radio stations from Pune. This anomaly lasted 60-90 minutes.
On the other hand, in Pune, some radio stations shifted forward by 0.2 Mhz.
Meteor shower responsible?
The anomaly is speculated to have been caused by a meteor shower or some kind of unprecedented solar activity. He explained that usually, AM radio signals get reflected back from the ionosphere (a region of the Earth’s upper atmosphere, from about 60 km to 1,000 km altitude. "FM signals don’t get reflected from the ionosphere, but in this case, the ionisation is so strong that even FM signals were getting reflected back. One possible reason for this could be some meteor shower activity that was going on. Another reason could be attributed to solar activity."
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