Solar Flares "It was the perfect storm" Carrington Event
Solar flares
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"It was the perfect storm"
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In 1859 the sun hurled a gigantic torch of gas and particles towards the earth. Nasa now evaluated newly discovered data. The result: A renewed "century storm" would be a disaster for electricity and communications networks.
Carrington Event
There were only a few astronomers who knew what would happen. At the end of August, 1859, they had discovered that the surface of the sun was strewn with numerous dark spots, which point to extremely dense magnetic fields. The fields intertwined and hurled a gigantic solar torch into space. In the affected region, the sun shone a full minute twice as bright as usual.
17 hours and 40 minutes later, it was no longer just astronomers who noticed the inferno in space. Shorts were tearing through telegraph wires and triggered numerous fires in the US and Europe - at a time when the telegraph was 15 years old and a power grid was virtually non-existent, let alone satellites, telephone networks or broadcasters. Northern lights, usually only visible on the poles, suddenly appeared over Rome and Hawaii.
In 18 hours from the sun to the earth
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What happened? The sun ejected a plasma wall exactly in the direction of the earth, with an extraordinary speed. Solar storms usually take two to four days to travel the 150 million kilometers to Earth. This managed it in just 18 hours. In addition, the magnetic fields within the plasma flow were enormously strong. "Fourth, and most importantly, the Earth's magnetic field turned in the direction away from the torch," says Nasa expert Bruce Tsurutani, who is now studying a solar storm with colleagues from Brazil and India in the journal "Journal of Geophysical Research" Of 1859.
As a rule, the earth magnetic field keeps the permanent current of charged particles, the solar wind, away from Earth. The so-called coronal mass ejection of September 1, 1859, however, penetrated the protective shield and reached the upper layers of the atmosphere, providing for spectacular lights and a lot of shorts.
By itself, none of the four events that caused the storm would bring any astronomer into a hurry. "But together they had the strongest disruption of the ionosphere ever recorded," Tsurutani said. "It was the perfect storm in space."
Solar outburst caused millions
Solar outbursts lead every few years to failures on Earth and in orbit. In 1994, for example, two communication satellites were significantly disrupted; Staff from Canadian newspapers, television and radio stations had a bad day. On other occasions, mobile radio networks, GPS systems, and power networks were temporarily lost. In 1989, a solar storm struck the electricity network in Canadian Quebec. Millions of people sat in the dark for nine hours, the damage estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars.
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