Solar Storms

By Varshini Srinivasan

The Sun., important for not just photosynthesis, but its growing popularity in scenic landscape photography and not to mention the golden hour selfies. And though it might seem calm, smooth sphere bathing us in its light and warmth... It's more complicated up close.

A Solar Storm consists of two parts: Solar Flare and Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). Solar Flares are sudden bursts of the brightness of the Sun, usually observed on its surface or close by. CMEs are enormous bubbles of superheated gas and plasma that travel away from the sun in different directions at a million miles per hour.

The heat of the Sun rips atoms in it into nuclei and electrons, flowing around each other in what is called Plasma. This Plasma is pushed around and shaped by the Sun's magnetic field, that same field that keeps every planet in its orbit. However, it is to be noted that Electricity and Gravity are two different things. Electricity is one part of a vital force - Electromagnetism.

Electricity creates a magnetic field and a Magnetic field creates electricity.

In the Sun, the plasma containing electrically charged particles creates a magnetic field, and this, in turn, shapes the flow of those particles. This feedback loop is called a Dynamo which keeps the Sun's magnetic field alive.

The magnetic field of the Sun stores enormous amounts of energy that spreads across the solar system that carries with it a slight trickle of solar plasma called the Solar Wind. Like a drizzle across the system, that manifests as the Aurora Borealis, Northern lights. However, it doesn't always remain that way. Occasionally, the plasma churns around itself creating Magnetic Knots creating - Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). These maintain a steady straight path and often come nowhere near Earth.

But sometimes, one of them happens to travel right towards us.

When one such cloud hits Earth, a geomagnetic storm brews and takes place, bringing down the satellites, space crafts, and electronics. The last solar storm of a large scale happened in 1859 known as the Carrington Event when the only electronic based device was the telegraph, the 'Victorian Internet. The geomagnetic disturbances were so strong that some operators couldn't get telegraphs to function, while others reported their telegraphs catching on fire. During this event, Northern lights could be seen as far down south as Cuba and Honolulu, and Southern lights could be seen as far as Santiago, Chile. The brightness of these lights was so strong that people got up to make breakfast in the middle of the night.

"The flares were so powerful that people in the northeastern U.S. could read newspaper print just from the light of the aurora," Daniel Baker, of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, said at a geophysics meeting.

But the storm doesn't have to be massive to see its effects. The "Halloween storms" of 2003, for instance, interfered with satellite communications, produced a brief power outage in Sweden, and lighted up the skies with ghostly auroras as far south as Florida and Texas.

One Solar Superstorm as big as the one in 1859 missed Earth by a week in 2012. It just grazed past us, hitting our solar observatory spacecraft. The craft survived and provided its researchers with valuable data on CME's.

"If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces," says Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado (NASA article, 2014).

"We live in a cyber cocoon enveloping the Earth. Imagine what the consequences might be," said Baker, University of Colorado (National Geographic article 2011).

Baker's words are more relevant now than ever, being wrapped in a "cyber cocoon", with an imminent threat of the occurrence of another major solar storm's probability increasing every year.