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- Solar storms, which involve magnetized particles emerging from the sun, can shake the Earth's magnetic field balance.
- If a solar storm were strong enough, it could desorb satellites and paralyze the power grid.
- The sun has been extremely calm lately. But this is not necessarily a good sign.
We do not always notice what the sun does, sitting some 100 million kilometers away on Earth. But there is always a chance that he can shoot our bad weather.
On the surface of the sun, giant fire eruptions can send magnetically charged particles into space. If these particles come into contact with the Earth's magnetic field, they can have dangerous effects.
If a solar storm breaks through the earth's atmosphere, it can send solar particles to the planet and weaken our protective magnetic bubble. The biggest solar storms can cause drive effects in our electrical systems, heating and even destroying electrical infrastructure. This can derail electronic communications, and it has already happened several times.
The most important and dangerous solar storms are caused by coronal mass ejections, which are essentially large fireballs that burst from the sun. Scientists are still unsure of what is causing these explosions, but they know that they are related to the sun's magnetic field. Researchers can observe bursts about eight minutes after their take off from the sun, which is the time needed to travel from the sun to Earth.
"The problem is that we can not control this big garbage ball in the center of the solar system," Astrophysicist Scott McIntosh, who heads the High Altitude Observatory at the Center, told Business Insider. National Atmospheric Research.
He said that the Earth's upper atmosphere is "badly" affected by the magnetic sputum of the sun, which can shake our delicate modern balance of technology and wires.
"It's true even if you do not feel it every day," he said. "You might not, your banking institution could, your power grid business certainly does, and your phone company does absolutely."
Solar storms can cause significant damage
Space forecasters usually have between 17 and 36 hours warning that a cloud of these dangerous particles is en route to the Earth from the sun. Then they run models to see where the impacts of magnetic disturbances could land. This is a significant delay because electromagnetism is the engine of our technology. When Earth's magnetic balance is turned off, the wires and cables do not operate normally and satellites can even fall out of the geosynchronous orbit.
McIntosh said that the US government is so worried about these threats that it is aggressively scaling up a plan to build more super-transformers able to withstand geomagnetic storms.
"All your infrastructure is toasting," he said. This may be especially true at higher latitudes and where underground minerals have high conductivity, as in the northeastern United States. "Could you imagine DC or New York being without electricity for six months, or eight months a year because of a solar event that they did not expect well?"
Space forecasters who monitor the sun's activity from an observatory in Hawaii are doing their best to avoid this fateful scenario. They call energy providers in vulnerable places of the country whenever they think that the Kp index (which measures geomagnetic activity) could cross a crucial threshold. Their recommendation is usually to lower the voltage on the power lines for a few days to avoid blowing the transformers.
On average, federal forecasters say that they alert the power companies about dangerous incoming solar fallout about once a month. Usually, everything takes place outside the consciousness of the general public.
The aurora borealis may also be the sign that a solar storm is playing with the Earth's magnetic field. Typically, this show is reserved for people close to the poles. But when the light show begins to drift to more temperate latitudes, the dancing sky gives us a clue that there are disturbances in the magnetosphere.
The big solar storms have already struck us
Perhaps the most infamous solar fire related to Earth was the Carrington rocket of 1859. The rocket illuminates the "northern" lights as far south as Hawaii.
"It blew up telegraph lines all over the world," McIntosh said.
NASA / SDO / GSFC]Scientists have estimated that a large rocket rivaling that of 1859 would paralyze our modern energy grid, and that it would take $ 2 trillion to rebuild large energy networks during the first year of recovery.
In 2012, the Earth narrowly missed an important solar storm as big as Carrington's.
"If the eruption had occurred only a week earlier, the Earth would have been in the line of fire, "said astrophysicist Daniel Baker after publishing a storm study in 2013.
However, other eruptions have touched the Earth more recently. In 1989, six million Quebeckers lost their electricity for nine hours because of the solar flare. Then there were the Halloween solar storms of October and November 2003, when 17 eruptions erupted on the sun at a time. The planes were rerouted, spacecraft instruments were turned off and power was cut off in Sweden for about an hour, NASA said. That year, aurora borealis were seen in Texas and Florida.
And just last year, when typhoon hurricanes Irma, Harvey and Maria bombed the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, the Earth was hit by the largest solar flare we had seen in a decade. While the hurricane clouds made it difficult for the radio waves to travel efficiently, the sun went down and temporarily rendered the ham radios (an essential part of disaster relief work).
Is it a big one on the way?
Although much of the activity of the sun is still mysterious, we know that the big orange ball runs on a cycle of 11 years of high activity low. Recently, the sun has calmed down each cycle. At the moment, we are at the solar minimum recorded the lowest in 100 years. McIntosh predicts that the next cycle will be 25% lower than that. But a quiet sun is not a calm sun.
"The greatest geomagnetic storms happen when the sun is very weak," he said.
A big solar storm could make modern life a waste, since without electricity, sewage can be supported in cities. And what would happen if the satellite-powered GPS kept an autonomous car on the road while a big solar storm hits?
"I'd hate to be like the boy who cried the wolf," said McIntosh, "but if something bad happened, could we face it?"
In 2014, physicist Pete Riley estimated that the probabilities of a big Carrington-sized storm reaching Earth over the next decade are about 12%. It's more than a one in ten chance.
McIntosh said that we only know a good way to withstand a solar storm of this magnitude: "You shoot the hatches electronically, you feed everything, and you try to take it out and hope that when you come back, it is still there."
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