SPACE — On September 2, 1859, the earth experienced an extreme geomagnetic storm known as the Carrington event. The Carrington event caused disruption to power grids throughout the world.
Reporting from EarthSky, the Carrington incident caused compasses at sea to malfunction, resulting in several ships disappearing due to loss of direction. Telegraph networks around the world experienced disruption due to the Carrington incident.
Interestingly, as a result of the Carrington event, people in the southern Caribbean and Mexico saw the aurora. What and how did the Carrington incident occur?
The Carrington event was the impact of the sun’s largest geomagnetic storm. The Carrington event is named after Richard Carrington, a famous English astronomer in the 19th century who focused on researching the sun.
He researched the position of the sun’s north and south poles. He was the first to recognize that the sun does not rotate as a solid object, but that solar matter rotates faster at the sun’s equator than at its poles.
He discovered that dark spots on the sun’s surface, called sunspots, varied with latitude during the 11-year solar cycle. He and his colleague Richard Hodgson saw the first quite powerful solar flare.
On the first day of September 1859, he was observing sunspots and saw a bright flash of light. What Carrington saw was believed to be corona mass ejection (CME), a powerful eruption near the surface of the sun.
Carrington immediately reported the flash to the Royal Astronomical Society. When fast-moving solar particles travel through space towards Earth, this causes the geomagnetic field to become damaged.
The explosion of solar particles hit, compressing and damaging Earth’s magnetosphere, releasing approximately 1,026 electron volts of energy. This amount of energy is equivalent to a 10 megaton nuclear bomb. This amount of energy is also the same as the amount of energy released by the sun in about 10 seconds.
This event is the strongest solar event ever recorded. The impact was so extraordinary that it damaged the technological network on Earth.
The extreme geomagnetic storm subsided the next day. The worldwide telegraph network was improved. The brilliant aurora faded from view, and the world returned to normal. However, the story of the Carrington incident still exists today.
2023-10-22 22:54:00
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