In 1859, British astronomer Richard Carrington saw a burst of white light on the surface of the Sun.
This is what scientists are now calling the Carrington event, the largest solar storm on record. It was linked to an unusual aurora borealis – northern and southern auroras – visible in the sky near the poles and equator, from Canada to Australia, and a massive solar flare caused power outages from Paris to Boston.
And while the Carrington event may sound like history, in today’s world where humanity is increasingly dependent on electricity, there are many concerns about what would happen if an event were worse—even more powerful than the event Carrington—hit Earth.
1859 Carrington incident
On Thursday, September 2, 1859, at about 11:18 a.m. in the town of Redhill outside London, Carrington was investigating a group of dark spots on the sun known as solar spots, when he discovered what he later described as a “lone flash” of light that continued for about five minutes.
According to a study published in 2016 in the journal Advances in Space Research, this is the first solar flare ever seen and reported.
Magnetic sensors at Kew Observatory in London revealed unusual magnetic disturbances on Earth between August 28 and September 7 of that year, specifically August 28 and September 2.
The Times of London reported on September 6, 1859: “Bright waves broke out in rapid succession, some bright enough to cast a visible shadow on the earth.”
The color pictures were so bright that people in Missouri could read by atmospheric light after midnight, according to an 1859 report in the Weekly West.
The northern and southern lights usually appear near the planet’s poles. However, during the Carrington event, people experienced the aurora throughout the tropics, including Cuba, Jamaica, and Panama, according to a 2016 study.
The Aurora borealis is also seen in the southern hemisphere. For example, in Moreton Bay in Australia.
Meanwhile, the telegraph lines experienced “one of the most surprising and singular electrical phenomena” when “the abundance of electricity in the air” enabled the telegraph machines to send messages from New York to Pittsburgh without requires batteries.
According to a report published on September 24, 1859 in The Illustrated London News, sparks were ignited by telegraph machines in Paris, and telegraph operator Frederick Royce in Washington, DC, reported that he had received “a very violent shock.”
Overall, the Carrington incident affected about half of the telegraph stations in the United States, according to a 2016 study.
What causes the Carrington object?
Solar flares, the largest eruptive events in the solar system, according to NASA, are intense bursts of plasma and radiation associated with sunspots. The sun emits solar flares when the magnetic energy stored in our star is suddenly released, according to a 2021 study by Hugh Hudson, a heliophysicist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Solar flares are often accompanied by the emission of giant bubbles of solar matter known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). NASA noted that these volcanic eruptions can contain billions of tons of plasma – clouds of electrically charged particles – that can travel at millions of miles per hour.
Hudson said in his study that the Carrington event triggered a geomagnetic storm on our planet.
The explosion probably ejected the coronal mass that blasted our planet into high-speed storms of super-hot plasma clouds with intense magnetic fields embedded within them. When such bursts hit Earth’s magnetosphere—an envelope around the planet that captures plasma trapped by Earth’s magnetic field—this plasma can flow along the planet’s magnetic field lines and collide with particles in the Earth’s atmosphere, causing the aurora borealis.
Solar flares can also cause intense electric currents in the magnetosphere, according to NOAA. These currents, in turn, can create magnetic disturbances in the Earth that can generate electric currents in long sections of electrically conductive materials such as power lines, communication cables and pipelines.
Geomagnetic storms have the potential to wreak havoc on Earth. In 1989, a geomagnetic storm covered the entire province of Quebec in Canada for 90 seconds, leaving 6 million customers in the dark for nine hours, according to NASA. It also damaged transformers as far away as New Jersey, including those at nuclear power plants, and nearly destroyed US power networks from the East Coast to the Pacific Northwest.
NOAA notes that geomagnetic storms can also disrupt radio communications and GPS navigation by disrupting the atmosphere in a way that changes radio signal paths. For example, the 2003 Halloween storm prevented the FAA from providing GPS navigation guidance for about 30 hours.
NOAA says solar plasma can also heat the planet’s upper atmosphere and make it puffy, possibly pulling satellites into low Earth orbit.
What will the Carrington event do today?
The world has become more dependent on electricity than when the Carrington event occurred. And if a similarly powerful solar flare were directed at Earth, it could cause unprecedented damage if it exploded now and not far from our planet, where it would have no direct consequences for our world.
For example, a 2013 study by British insurance giant Lloyd’s of London estimated that a power outage resulting from a Carrington event could result in a loss of $2.6 trillion in revenue for the North American energy industry only. The study also found that global blackouts can last for years, as such an event can simultaneously damage many high-voltage transformers that are difficult to replace.
This could lead to significant disruptions in financial markets, banking, telecommunications, business transactions, emergency services, hospitals, water and fuel pumping, and food transportation.
Similarly, a 2017 study in the journal Space Weather found that in the most extreme blackout scenario, affecting 66% of the US population, there could be $41.5 billion in daily local losses in economy, including an additional $7 billion in losses from power outages in the international supply chain. Conversely, if it had only affected the extreme northern states, which account for 8% of the US population, daily economic losses would have reached $6.2 billion, supported by $0.8 billion in international supply chain losses . (Study calculated using 2011 US dollars).
But while the Carrington incident was strong, “We’ve seen similar incidents since then,” Hudson said. For example, the two so-called solar Halloweens in 2003 may have each emitted similar amounts of radiant energy as the Carrington event.
Therefore, Hudson suggested that a solar flare on the scale of the Carrington event may not pose as great a threat to humanity as some fear. But today’s event at Carrington “will have a significant impact, especially on human activity in space.”
“We don’t have a lot of applications for an event like this because space beings have never experienced an event of this magnitude,” Hudson said. Said. In fact, the Apollo astronauts made their flights to the moon in the middle of solar activity – “it was at a lower level, but still very dangerous for unprotected people in space”.
Additionally, there is evidence that the Sun may have “super planets” that may emit 10 times or more energy than the Carrington event. For example, in a 2021 study in The Astrophysical Journal, scientists using NASA’s Kepler space telescope found that over a four-year period, 15 Sun-like stars produced 26 superstars that filled a wall 100 times larger than the Carrington event. A 2020 study published in The Astrophysical Journal found similar results in the first year of NASA’s ongoing TESS mission.
Also, scientists examining tree rings found evidence of radioactive carbon-14 atoms from solar flares – each with two more neutrons than normal carbon atoms in its nucleus. The increase in carbon-14 seen in 660 BC, AD 774 and AD 994 may have come from superplanets stronger than the Carrington event, Hudson said.
“The remarkable thing is that even a Carrington event or a relatively large mundane event cannot be detected by carbon-14 technology. So these old records are a warning,” Hudson said.
When is the next Carrington event?
A 2021 Astrophysical Journal study, analyzing Kepler data, suggests that superplanets may be about 10 times more active every 3,000 years than a Carrington event, and about 100 times more a lot of energy every 6,000 years. But specifically, the rates at which our Sun emits flares similar to or stronger than Carrington’s are “not well understood,” Hudson said.
He noted that when it comes to solar flares that can release large spikes of carbon-14 atoms seen in tree rings, scientists now know of at least six “scattered throughout the Holocene, a scale of time of 10,000 years.”
Source: Life Sciences
Source: Arabic RT
