Even if we had been able to forecast the storm, the planet’s defenses against the most severe forms of space weather are limited, and our increasing reliance on electronics makes us susceptible to its impacts.
On the weekend, a geomagnetic storm struck our planet, shocking scientists as it did not appear to have originated from a solar flare.
The storm occurred at a rare alignment of five planets, allowing photographers to shoot them against a brilliant aurora.
Astronomers currently believe that the storm was created by far rarer phenomena than a solar flare: a co-rotating interaction region (CIR) caused by the collision of two streams of solar wind.
CIRs are formed when solar wind streams of different speeds contact, bringing with them a massive shock and plasma buildup at an exceptional speed (in this example, 700 kilometers per second) and without the presence of a sunspot.
Without a sunspot indicating a coronal mass ejection, astronomers did not indicate an impending geomagnetic storm.
According to the Space Weather news site, the storm managed to “create a break in our planet’s magnetosphere” when it reached Earth.
A week before the solar storm, a massive sunspot, more than twice the size of our planet, was aimed toward Earth.
Scientists do not know if it was associated with the CIR, even though it subsequently rotated away and the probability of a dangerous CME diminished.
But even if we had been able to forecast the storm, the planet’s defenses against the most powerful forms of space weather are limited, and our growing reliance on electronics makes us susceptible to their impacts.
The Carrington Event, which occurred in 1859, is regarded to be the greatest solar storm ever recorded.
It left an aurora visible across the sky, even in latitudes far closer to the equator, and was regarded as even brighter than a full moon by modern observers.
It resulted in the breakdown of telegraph systems in Europe and North America, and a similar storm today may cost trillions of dollars in damage worldwide.
The detonation of scores of naval mines in Vietnam in the 1970s was quick and practically instantaneous, according to researchers who believe that magnetic radiation from massive solar storms was responsible.
SpaceX revealed earlier this year that a geomagnetic storm destroyed the majority of the Starlink satellites it intended to deploy into orbit.
Solar activity has been known to rise and fall naturally every 11 years, but not precisely, and astronomers estimate that we are currently entering a phase of heightened solar activity that could reach its peak in 2025.
In 2020, a new family of sunspots identified on the surface of our star unleashed the most powerful solar outburst since 2017.
