And other stars, such as Proxima Centauri, show that even the most energetic documented solar outbursts pale in comparison with what is possible. Tree rings and ice cores encode echoes of dramatically stronger solar storms in the distant past. The 1859 storm, named the Carrington Event for the scientist who witnessed the flare that preceded it, has long been upheld as the most powerful wallop that the sun has ever delivered.īut in recent years, research has indicated that the Carrington Event was just a taste of what the Sun can throw at us. Upon arrival at Earth, such an ejection can trigger the most ferocious of geomagnetic storms. Such a blob - a tangle of plasma and magnetic fields - is known as a coronal mass ejection. The actual impetus was a bit more prosaic: The skies had been set ablaze by an enormous blob of electrically charged gas, shot out from the Sun following a flash of light known as a solar flare. “The hands of angels shifted the glorious scenery of the heavens,” reported the Cincinnati Daily Commercial. The events of that Friday evoked biblical descriptions. Sparks flew from equipment - some of which caught on fire - and operators in Boston and Portland, Maine, yanked telegraph cables from batteries but kept transmitting, powered by the electrical energy surging through the Earth. Meanwhile, telegraph networks went haywire. “The whole of the northern hemisphere was as light as though the Sun had set an hour before,” the Times of London reported a few days later. Folks in Missouri could read by its light, while miners sleeping outdoors in the Rocky Mountains woke up and, thinking it was dawn, started making breakfast. At that time, a brilliant aurora lit up the planet, appearing as far south as Havana. It would be bad news if the Earth’s sun ever got so angry.īut the Sun does have its moments - most famously, in the predawn hours of Sep. The radiation burst was strong enough to split any water molecules that might exist on the temperate, Earth-sized planet orbiting that star repeated blasts of that magnitude might have stripped the planet of any atmosphere. In a matter of seconds, Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our Sun, got thousands of times brighter than usual - up to 14,000 times brighter in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum. On May 1, 2019, the star next door erupted.
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