A powerful solar flare recently occurred, but fortunately, it did not have a significant impact on Earth. However, it serves as a reminder of the potential dangers of solar flares and their effects on our planet. The solar flare was classified as a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) and was traveling at three times the normal CME speed. This increased speed meant that the flare had the potential to cause significant disruptions to Earth's magnetic field and potentially damage electronic systems. The most disruptive solar storm ever recorded was the Carrington Event in 1859.
00:00On July 23, 2024, Europe's Solar Orbiter spacecraft observed a super-powerful solar flare erupting from the far side of the Sun.
00:10This flare wasn't the most extreme ever recorded, but still, we got extremely lucky this time not to get fried by it.
00:18Such solar flares often cause long-lived raging radiation storms, and if such a storm moves in the direction of Earth, it can lead to worldwide blackouts.
00:30Before we go deeper into details of that potentially disastrous solar flare, we need to figure out what exactly this solar phenomenon is.
00:39Solar flares occur because the magnetic fields in the atmosphere of our star are moving non-stop.
00:45When the Sun is approaching its solar maxima, and that's the most active period of its 11-year-long cycle, which is, by the way, exactly what's happening now,
00:54its magnetic fields get more and more tangled, making our star look like an enormous ball of tangled rubber bands.
01:01They loop around, cross over one another, cut one another off, and then reconnect.
01:06Ever seen iron filings sprinkled on a bar magnet?
01:12These filings line up along the magnetic lines of force.
01:16Like that, the hot plasma on the surface of the Sun is at the mercy of the magnetic lines of force.
01:22Sometimes, when the magnetic fields interact with each other, some plasma gets disconnected from the fields,
01:28and its particles accelerate to immense speeds and send powerful radiation to space.
01:34Other times, our star throws off massive amounts of matter.
01:40Those events are coronal mass ejections, CMEs.
01:45Just one CME can contain as much as 20 billion tons of material.
01:50If that material were rock, it would create a mountain about 2.75 miles across and almost a half a mile tall.
01:58The ejected material often travels at a speed of over a million miles per hour.
02:04Solar flares and CMEs are the most powerful explosions in the solar system, releasing unimaginable amounts of energy.
02:12Solar flares have their own classification according to their strength.
02:16The smallest and weakened ones are A and B class.
02:19Then there are C and M class solar flares.
02:22And the strongest are X class flares.
02:25A number from 1 to 9, and in some cases a larger one, accompanies each letter.
02:30That's similar to the Richter scale for earthquakes.
02:33A and B class flares are too weak to affect our planet.
02:37As for C class flares, they may have small noticeable consequences.
02:42M class flares can cause short radio blackouts at the poles and weak radiation storms that can still harm astronauts.
02:49But the most dangerous of them all are X class flares.
02:52These are flares more than 10 times more powerful than X1.
02:57That's why the classification of X class flares can go higher than 9.
03:01Now, let's get back to that recent solar flare.
03:05It was X14 class 1.
03:07Now, we already know that it means it was an extra strong flare.
03:11Other large flares astronomers have detected recently include an X12 solar flare that happened on the 20th of May,
03:18and an X10 flare that occurred on the 17th of July.
03:22All of them have come from the backside of the Sun.
03:25If we talk of the Earth side of our star, the largest solar flare that has been recorded so far within this solar cycle happened on the 14th of May.
03:35It was an X8.7 flare that led to radio blackouts.
03:40And a strong geomagnetic storm, leading to magnificent auroras all over the world, occurred a few days earlier.
03:47Powerful coronal mass ejections accompanied this storm.
03:50As for the July X class flare, it was so powerful that it could have ended up tragically for us.
03:57Luckily, all that magnetically charged plasma blast that accompanied the flare didn't travel in our direction.
04:03If it had, it would have been quite the solar storm.
04:07Auroras would have been incredibly impressive and a wee bit terrifying in their magnificence.
04:12But at the same time, such a dynamic blast of energetic particles hurtling our way
04:17could have caused major technological problems and electrical blackouts,
04:21like the event in 1989, which severely harmed Quebec's power grid,
04:26or a much, much earlier catastrophe that still managed to cause a lot of harm to the world.
04:32I'm talking about the Carrington event, which occurred in 1859
04:36and was the first documented solar flare affecting our planet.
04:41It happened on the 1st of September and was named after Richard Carrington,
04:44the solar astronomer who witnessed the flare through his own telescope
04:48and sketched the sun's sunspots.
04:50According to scientists, that flare was the most powerful documented solar storm
04:55over the last 500 years.
04:58The Carrington event triggered auroras that were visible as far south as the Caribbean.
05:03It led to severe interruptions in telegraph services all over the world,
05:07even shocking some telegraph operators and sparking fires
05:11after discharges from the lines ignited telegraph paper.
05:14Another major solar flare that erupted on the 4th of August 1972
05:20destroyed long-distance phone communication across a few states, including Illinois.
05:25This event even made the American Telephone and Telegraph Company
05:29redesign its power system for transatlantic cables.
05:33Now, let's move to March 1985,
05:36when two super-powerful CMEs triggered a geomagnetic storm,
05:40which, in turn, set off a power blackout in Canada on the 13th of March.
05:46This blackout left around 6 million people without electricity for nine hours.
05:51It is said that the flare disrupted electric power transmission
05:54from the Hydro-Quebec generation station
05:56and melted a few power transformers in New Jersey.
06:00And still, this solar flare was nowhere near the power of the Carrington event.
06:04The Bastille Day solar storm took its name from the French national holiday
06:10because it occurred on the same day, on the 14th of July in the year 2000.
06:15It was an X5-class event that caused some satellites to short-circuit
06:20and resulted in radio blackouts.
06:22It's still one of the most highly observed solar storm events.
06:25From October to November 2003,
06:30our star unleashed a series of large solar flares and coronal mass ejections,
06:34and they did reach Earth and slam into our atmosphere.
06:37Those solar storms, also known as Halloween storms of 2003,
06:42caused aircraft to be rerouted, impacted satellite systems,
06:46and led to power outages in Sweden.
06:49Besides, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory
06:52couldn't fulfill its functions during this solar onslaught.
06:55On the 28th of October, 2003,
06:59the Sun sent a whopper of a solar flare our way.
07:02The fire was so powerful,
07:04it overwhelmed the spacecraft sensor that was measuring it.
07:07The sensor topped out at a whopping X-28.
07:11But later, scientists figure out that the flare
07:13had reached a peak strength of about X-45.
07:17One more thing that made the Halloween storms so scary
07:20was that they happened during a time in the solar cycle
07:23when solar activity is usually quiet.
07:26That's two to three years after the solar maximum.
07:29According to NASA's statistics,
07:31just 17 powerful flares erupted from our star during that time.
07:36The Sun spewed out another X-class solar flare on the 5th of December, 2006.
07:40It was an X-9-class flare that disrupted satellite-to-ground communications
07:45and GPS navigational signals for around 10 minutes.
07:49That solar storm was so powerful,
07:52it even damaged the solar X-ray imager instrument on the GOES-13 satellite.
07:56It's the same damage to several pixels of its detector.
07:59In February 2022, SpaceX experienced the terrifying power of our star
08:06when a devastating geomagnetic storm destroyed 38 Starlink satellites
08:11worth tens of millions of dollars.
08:13It happened shortly after they were deployed.
08:16Unfortunately, Starlink satellites are especially vulnerable to geomagnetic storms
08:20since they're released into extremely low-altitude orbits,
08:24between 60 and 120 miles.
08:26They also rely on their onboard engines to overcome the drag force
08:30and raise themselves to their final altitude
08:33of around 350 miles over the surface of our planet.
08:37The thing is, during a geomagnetic storm,
08:41Earth's atmosphere absorbs energy from the storm,
08:43heats up, and extends upwards.
08:46It results in a denser thermosphere,
08:48which means more drag,
08:49and it can be a serious issue for satellites.
08:52That's exactly what happened.
08:54The batch of newly released Starlink satellites
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