A new solar storm is arriving on Earth: it should hit the Earth’s atmosphere around the middle of today and could be intense enough to give rise to the expected show of the Northern Lights even at low latitudes like the Italian ones, thus repeating the experience of the storm that occurred last November 5, in which the auroras were also spotted in Greece and Turkey. Meanwhile, a new study published in the journal The Astrophysical Journal and led by the Japanese University of Nagoya, in which the National Institute of Astrophysics also participated, has identified a third record storm among the most extreme ones that have occurred in history, dating back to 1872: this is therefore added to the already known ones of Carrington of 1859 and the New York railway of 1921.
However, today’s event will not be even remotely comparable to the enormous solar storm that occurred in February 1872, which produced aurora borealis even near the equator, visible from cities such as India’s Mumbai and the Sudanese capital Khartoum. A group of researchers from nine countries led by Hisashi Hayakawa has now studied this event in detail, tracing back the solar activity from which it originated and tracing the vast impacts it had on Earth: at the time, in fact, the storm interrupted much of the communications were via telegraph for several hours, and the results show that such extreme storms are perhaps more common than we think.
To trace the solar origin, the authors of the study analyzed old data on sunspots preserved in historical archives, especially Italian and Belgian, while to evaluate the terrestrial impact they used measurements of the geomagnetic field carried out in various places. Added to these are over 700 accounts, written in different languages, of auroras generated by the storm. One of the most interesting aspects of the 1872 event, called the Chapman-Silverman storm, was that it probably originated from a medium-sized but very complex group of sunspots: this suggests that even small sunspots can trigger huge geomagnetic storms.
“Our results confirm the Chapman-Silverman storm of February 1872 as one of the most extreme in recent history,” says Hayakawa. “Such extreme events are rare. On the one hand, we are lucky not to have seen such superstorms in modern times. On the other hand – continues the researcher – the occurrence of three super-storms of this type in six decades demonstrates that the threat to modern society is real. This is why the preservation and analysis of historical documents are very important to evaluate, understand and mitigate the impact of such events.”
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Source: Ansa
I am a journalist with over 6 years of experience working in the news industry. I currently work as an author for Global Happenings, and my coverage focuses on Technology news. I have written for various publications, including Reuters, The New York Times and The Guardian.
