Next time your cellphone drops a call, don't blame the pesky elevator or subway -- blame the sun.
A Queen's University study, set to be published in an upcoming edition of the international journal, Proceedings of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), has found solar flares are likely to blame for cellphones losing their signal.
The flares, radio-frequency energy bursts emitting from the sun, have a negative impact on cellphones when their host tower's antennae is facing the sun.
The findings show between nine and 20 per cent of calls have been dropped because of the correlation.
"We believe that this is caused by the Sun radiating energy into the Earth's magnetic field," said Queen's professor Dr. David Thomson in a press release issued by the university in Kingston, Ont.
"It's one of those things that people look at and say, 'It can't possibly be,' but a lot of experts have now given a thumbs-up to this theory."
Thomson began studying communications satellite failures in the 1990s but continued to study the issue when he came to Queen's in 2002 as Canada Research Chair in Statistics and Signal Processing.
He has been using the university's $600,000 rooftop solar radio telescope to help him track the activity and to give him further insight on how the sun affects all communications interruptions.
"Understanding our Sun's more than 10 million normal modes and their interactions with engineering systems on Earth is a challenge that we are just beginning to undertake," Thomson said. "What we have discovered is surprising and very different from the explanations that appear in most engineering textbooks."
