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posted by janrinok on Tuesday October 08 2019, @12:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-go-out-without-your-umbrella dept.

Extreme Solar Storms may be More Frequent than Previously Thought:

The September 1859 Carrington Event ejected concentrated solar plasma towards Earth, disrupting the planet's magnetic field and leading to widespread telegraph disturbances and even sporadic fires. New research in AGU's journal Space Weather indicates storms like the Carrington Event are not as rare as scientists thought and could happen every few decades, seriously damaging modern communication and navigation systems around the globe.

"The Carrington Event was considered to be the worst-case scenario for space weather events against the modern civilization... but if it comes several times a century, we have to reconsider how to prepare against and mitigate that kind of space weather hazard," said Hisashi Hayakawa, lead author of the new study and an astrophysicist at Osaka University in Osaka, Japan and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom.

[...] The researchers collected observations of the storm's auroras from the Russian Central Observatory, Japanese diaries, and newspapers from Portugal, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and Brazil. They then compared these observations to previous reports of the storm from the Western Hemisphere, like ship logs, contemporary scientific journals, and more newspapers.

[...] After reconstructing the storms around the Carrington Event, the researchers compared the solar storm to other storms in 1872, 1909, 1921, and 1989 and found two of them – those in 1872 and 1921 – were comparable to this event. The 1989 event caused a serious blackout throughout all of Quebec, Canada. This means events like the Carrington may not be as legendary and elusive as once thought, and scientists need to consider the hazards of such events more seriously than before, according to Hayakawa.

"While the 1859 storm was certainly one of the most extreme events, this seems at best comparable to the 1872 storm and 1921 storm in terms of its intensity," he said. "So, the Carrington event is no longer something unique. This fact may require us to reconsider the occurrence frequency of this kind of 'worst-case scenario' of space weather events."

More information:
Hisashi Hayakawa et al. Temporal and Spatial Evolutions of a Large Sunspot Group and Great Auroral Storms around the Carrington Event in 1859, Space Weather (2019). DOI: 10.1029/2019SW002269

Today we have continuous observations of the sun being reported to us by STEREO, among others, so we will at least have some advance notice when the next "Big One" comes our way. Satellite operators can re-orient their birds, or even put them in a low-power mode to avoid damage.

But how well will today's society be able to function when things we now take for granted are not available? Consider if several communications satellites were shut down and the traffic they once carried now needed to go over landlines, instead. Can the internet backbone deal with the extra traffic? If people cannot access their Satellite TV, will they then spend more time surfing videos on the internet, thereby adding to the already increased load?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 08 2019, @05:02PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 08 2019, @05:02PM (#904184)

    What are you going to do when the sun goes micronova for a few seconds (which is seems to do every ~15 thousand years)? The surface of the moon will melt, and forest fires will be started all over earth. Riverlands will be the only civilizations that survive.

  • (Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Wednesday October 09 2019, @01:54AM (1 child)

    by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Wednesday October 09 2019, @01:54AM (#904459)

    Source please