solar flare, an explosion on the sun that occurs when energy stored in a “twisted” magnetic field is suddenly released
NASA/SODATA/Alamy
The most powerful solar storm in history may have hit Earth 14,300 years ago, according to records preserved in tree trunks in the Alps. It’s unclear how much damage a similarly powerful storm would cause today, but it could theoretically knock out the power grid for months and destroy all satellites.
In 2012, Miyakebo Researchers at Japan’s Nagoya University have discovered evidence of extremely powerful solar flares from tree trunks – charged particles emitted by the sun that together with magnetized plasma and gamma rays make up solar storms. These flares date back centuries and may have caused a spike in radiocarbon levels in the trees.
Since then, at least nine ancient solar storms, known as the Miyake phenomenon, have been discovered using this method.
now, Tim Heaton and colleagues from the University of Leeds in the UK have found evidence of the largest solar storm in history, almost twice the size of the next largest Miyake phenomenon, in the trunks of pine trees in the southern French Alps.
“We have no idea what a similar storm would do if it happened today,” Heaton said. “Some people think it would be completely catastrophic, causing a month-long mass power outage in half the planet, destroying the satellite’s solar panels, and permanently shutting it down. ” Other predictions suggest much less disruption, but a lot of disruption. There is uncertainty, Heaton said.
Heaton and his team examined 140 different tree trunks buried on the banks of the Durance River in Provence. As the embankment eroded, the trunk was exposed, allowing the researchers to look for elevated levels of carbon-14. Carbon-14 is a type of carbon that has two more neutrons than normal and is produced by high-energy particles that collide with Earth’s atmosphere.
By comparing tree rings and building a timeline of when each tree was alive, researchers estimated that the carbon-14 spike occurred 14,300 years ago. They also matched this spike with elevated levels of beryllium from Greenland ice cores, which is produced in a similar way to carbon-14.
There’s no way to compare how big storms like this have been in recorded history, Heaton said. The largest solar storm for which we have evidence, the so-called Carrington phenomenon of 1859, caused fires and induced currents in telegraph wires, but this particular phenomenon was very small compared to the Miyake phenomenon. It was so small that even minute changes in radiocarbon levels were not recorded. record.
Currently, 10 imperial events are known over the past 15,000 years. It seems to occur relatively infrequently, but we don’t know if it occurs in any pattern or if it is predictable. It is also unclear what kind of changes the Sun undergoes to cause these changes. “They’re not part of the underlying behavior of the sun that people thought,” Heaton says. “We don’t even really know if these are completely special behaviors of the sun or just the edges of the more benign solar storms that we see all the time.”
One thing the radiocarbon spike doesn’t tell us is other behaviors of the sun that occur during solar storms, such as the emission of high-energy gamma rays and plasma, he says. Raimund Muscheler This is because radioactive carbon is produced only from the sun’s energetic particles such as protons.
More measurements are needed to understand these events. “This may be the biggest [solar storm] We’ve seen it in the past, and I think we’ve just scratched the surface,” Muscheler said.
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