Should a similar event take place today, it would have a devastating effect on society, scientists say.
Scientists have discovered evidence of one of the biggest solar storms ever recorded, when high-energy particles unleashed from the sun bombarded Earth just over 2,600 years ago. Should a similar event hit us today, it could have a devastating impact, potentially knocking out global communication systems, satellites, electrical grids and air traffic systems.
Evidence of solar storms hitting Earth in the past can be found in ice cores—samples of ice that formed over the past 100,000 years. Researchers are able to analyze the ice to find out when Earth was hit by an unusually high concentration of high-energy cosmic rays. This is only the third major solar storm event to be documented. Researchers say the current findings could mean the frequency of these “potentially devastating” events has probably been underestimated.
Leon Golub from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was not involved in the research, said the findings indicate a storm far bigger than the Carrington Event and hundreds of times larger than anything recorded during the space age. “Space weather is a potential threat to power systems, communication/GPS satellites and airline passengers and crew,” he said. “Much of what we know about space weather is predicated on data from the space age. But this study shows that the sun is capable of producing far more energetic—and possibly more damaging—events than we've witnessed in the last 50 years.
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