The same phenomenon that causes the magnificent Northern Lights can also cause far more damage than previously thought.
Joe is a freelance journalist. It all started with a lifelong passion for building his own PCs, which he first did as a teenager. It has become a permanent pleasure to put words on the subject on the Internet. He has written for CNET, PCMag, Mashable and SlashGear as a freelance writer and worked as a senior editor at Android Authority for 10 years. When he’s not writing about tech and science, he’s learning the ins and outs of home repair, gaming, bass, and posting PC building help and gaming subreddits. He firmly believes that orange juice should contain pulp.
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Sometimes the sun throws a tantrum, and that tantrum hits the Earth. For some people, this means a chance to see the magnificent Northern Lights light up the night sky. But solar storms can cause damage to Earth as well as various people and objects orbiting in space. Indeed, according to a new study, the risks linked to solar storms could be worse than initially thought.
The study, authored by Nithin Sivadas of NASA and Maria Walach of Lancaster University, posits that the scientific understanding of solar storms and electrical currents generated in Earth’s upper atmosphere may have been poorly understood and that solar storms may be much riskier, particularly for orbiting satellites and astronauts.
To understand the problem, it is essential to understand what the science currently says. When solar winds hit the upper atmosphere, they create all sorts of interactions, leading to effects like aurora and electric current. Current scientific consensus is that there is a maximum amount of electrical current that can exist in the upper atmosphere due to factors such as solar wind power, atmospheric limits, and current saturation. Once this threshold is reached, the Earth’s magnetosphere naturally dissipates the excess.
But this new research suggests that this limit doesn’t actually exist and that previous assumptions about it were based on “uncertainties in solar wind measurements.” These uncertainties are likely because most solar wind measurements are taken by spacecraft about a million miles closer to the sun than Earth, at a location known as Lagrange Point 1.
Measurements taken closer to Earth’s surface by NASA’s spacecraft show a direct correlation between solar wind strength and electrical current in the atmosphere, and suggest there is no upper limit as previously assumed. This means that the atmosphere can produce as much electricity as there is solar wind to produce it.
Extreme solar wind events can be observed far from the point of impact in the form of aurora borealis.
Nithin Sivadas NASA Goddard Space Flight CenterWhat risk are we talking about?
It’s not yet clear how much riskier solar storms are than science already knew. Solar storms have caused a lot of damage in the past, with examples such as the Carrington event of 1859 that set telegraph machines on fire or the solar storm of 12,350 BC, which researchers say was “an order of magnitude stronger than anything directly observed.” Further studies are still needed to understand the potential risks.
“If there is no upper limit to our planet’s response to solar wind, modeling of extreme cases must take this into account, and we must be vigilant for the effects of space weather,” Walach said in a statement. “Fortunately, these very extreme cases are rare, but that also means we have limited data to work with and only time will tell what happens in a very extreme once-in-a-thousand-year event.”
Current simulations that use the limitations explained above already paint a pretty bleak picture of our modern, heavily electronic existence. A solar storm of the magnitude of the Carrington event would bring down a significant number of Earth’s satellites and also cause incalculable damage to systems here on Earth. And it wouldn’t be the first time: during the Halloween solar storms in 2003, the Earth lost contact with 59% of its satellites. Even though modern technology is more resistant to these risks, it is not immune.
But there is good news. First, such a catastrophic solar storm would not mean the end of humanity. Walach says that Earth’s magnetic field “does a very good job of protecting us from many space weather effects” and that most of the time, all humans will notice is an occasional glitch or a beautiful aurora. She says satellites would fare less well in such extreme space weather conditions.
The other good news is that the Sun is nearing the end of its solar maximum for its current 11-year cycle (assuming it hasn’t already ended), so the chances of extreme space weather are much lower than in 2024, when Earth faced an extreme solar weather event that pushed the Northern Lights all the way to Texas for an entire week.
Joe is a freelance journalist. It all started with a lifelong passion for building his own PCs, which he first did as a teenager. It has become a permanent pleasure to put words on the subject on the Internet. He has written for CNET, PCMag, Mashable, and SlashGear as a freelance writer and worked as a senior editor at Android Authority for 10 years. When he’s not writing about tech and science, he’s learning the ins and outs of home repair, gaming, bass, and posting PC building help and gaming subreddits. He firmly believes that orange juice should contain pulp. See full biography