Researchers have identified what appears to be the largest solar storm to hit Earth, which occurred 14,300 years ago.
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of a solar flare on Oct. 2, 2014. The solar flare is the bright flash of light on the right limb of the sun. A burst of solar material erupting out into space can be seen just below it. The night sky lit up so bright that some people thought it was morning. Gold miners in the Rocky Mountains woke up at 1 a.m. to make breakfast and start their day. Birds began singing as if the sun had already risen.
Unlike the Carrington storm, the 14,300-year-old event does not have ground reports of bright, dancing lights or changes in animal behavior. Instead, scientists found traces of the solar storm in ancient tree rings in the French Alps and ice cores in Greenland. The amount of radiocarbon produced may have been between five to 10 times the amount normally produced in an entire year, said Tim Heaton, a co-author of the study. The team suggests the radiocarbon spike was caused by a massive solar storm or from a huge solar flare, which sent a huge amount of energetic particles into Earth’s atmosphere.“I certainly wasn’t expecting anything as significant as this,” said Heaton, a statistician at the University of Leeds in Britain.
This 14,300-year-old event appears to be bigger than any on record, but is one of nine extreme solar storms to occur in the last 15,000 years, discovered in tree rings over the past decade. These extreme events are known as Miyake events, named after Japanese physicist Fusa Miyake, who first discovered the radiocarbon spikes in tree rings in 2012. No Miyake event has been directly observed, like the Carrington Event.
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