IIt has been a season of celestial contests. March 24th and 25th saw a lunar eclipse in the Americas, Europe and North and East Asia. April 8 featured the total solar eclipse in North America. March and April also brought the appearance of the evocatively named Devil Comet. And last weekend, Earthlings were treated to a spectacular light show when a geomagnetic explosion on the Sun, known as coronal mass ejectionproduced a colorful display of the aurora borealis, a phenomenon usually limited to the north polar region but visible this time as far south as Alabama in the US and at similar latitudes around the world.
Coronal mass ejections produce not just spectacle but potentially deadly damage. When the Sun’s energy collides with Earth, it can disrupt satellites, derail GPS systems, shut down power plants and shut down telecommunications. Just like hurricanes, solar storms are classified into five categories by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), from minor to moderate to strong to severe to extreme.
On May 12, NOAA issued a rare severe to extreme warning for the event to unfold, although even at its peak, from May 10 to 12, there were no reports of power or satellite outages. But if Earth dodges this time, we’re in for a potentially difficult year or so as the Sun goes through one of its peak activity cycles.
So what’s happening out there, how great is the danger for us here on Earth, and how can we prepare?
What causes solar storms?
Just as the Earth has its seasons, the Sun also has them. However, solar seasons do not occur over months, but in 11-year cycles that produce periods of high activity, known as solar maximum, and low activity, known as solar minimum. The cycles are due to the fact that the Sun is not solid, which means that different parts of its surface rotate at different speeds.taking 25 days to complete a single rotation at the equator and 33 days at the poles. This causes the Sun’s magnetic field get tangled, slowly accumulating energy until it breaks. When this happens, the north and south magnetic poles swap places with each other, releasing energy that creates solar maximum. Once this energy is expended, the Sun returns to a less volatile solar minimum.
A telltale sign of high solar activity is sunspots, small patches of distorted magnetic fields on the sun. The greater the number of spots, the greater the solar volatility. The current eruption was associated with a sunspot 16 times the diameter of Earth and emitted billions of tons of plasma.superheated gas composed of charged particles.
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However, not all solar maximum or solar minimum are the same. “The Sun’s main cycle is 11 years, but people have noticed longer trends in sunspot activity,” says Michael Liemohn, professor of climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan. “There appears to be a century-long cycle during which the number of sunspots at solar maximum is lower for one or two cycles and then returns to a more normal level.”
The last period of solar maximum, which ended about ten years ago, was at the lower end of the energy spectrum. What ended 20 years ago was bigger. “We expect this current solar maximum to be larger than the previous one and more similar to the peak in solar activity 20 years ago,” says Liemohn.
How do coronal mass ejections endanger Earth?
The best way to understand the effect that solar storms have on our planet is to think of the atmosphere as similar to the gas in a fluorescent lamp. In the lamp, explains Liemohn, the electrodes at each end accelerate the electrons, which interact with the gas, transmitting energy to it and causing it to emit light. High in the atmosphere – 50 to 200 miles high – a similar process creates the aurora. Closer to the Earth’s surface, the effect is not as benign.
“Just like in a light bulb, there is an electrical current associated with fast electrons, and these spatial currents can induce other electrical currents in… conductive circuits here on the ground,” says Liemohn. “Circuits have to be very long, many kilometers, but high voltage power lines are susceptible to this effect.”
Damage to satellites is more direct and occurs in several ways. As NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center explains, geomagnetic storms heat the outer atmosphere, causing it to expand. This increases the satellites’ drag and can degrade their orbits. Charged particles that stream from the Sun during a solar storm can also penetrate a satellite or electrify its surface, damaging its components. The problem is especially severe on satellites in high orbits, more than 22,000 miles above Earth—which is the altitude at which most communications satellites fly.
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Manned spacecraft, like the International Space Station, orbit much lower.typically about 250 miles up. What offers astronauts some protection from Earth’s magnetosphere– which protects us from solar and cosmic rays on the ground. Still, astronauts receive more radiation dose than people and terrestrial animals, especially during a solar storm. The station or spacecraft itself provides additional protection – but an unprotected astronaut on the surface of the Moon or Mars would be in serious trouble during a solar storm. According to Space.com, a coronal mass ejection “shock wave” would expose the astronaut to the equivalent of 300,000 simultaneous chest x-rays, far more than the 45,000 that would be lethal.
Preparing for the next
Typically, a solar storm takes about a day to reach and pass Earth. The recent one lasted several days, Liemohn explains, because the Sun launched several storms in quick succession. “Earth is now in the recovery phase from the storm, which will last a few more days,” he said on May 12. “But now the aurora will be confined to its usual location at higher latitudes, in Alaska and Canada.”
More large storms are more likely to occur during this powerful solar maximum. Solar weather could take until mid-2025 to begin to wane, according to NOAA. So how can we prepare?
In 2019, Congress attempted to strengthen the United States’ defenses against space weather events when it passed the PROSWIFT Act, to promote research and observations of space weather to improve prediction of tomorrow. Under the law, Washington authorized NOAA, NASA, National Science Foundationindustry, academia, and more to research how to prepare for adverse space weather events and prioritize adequate funding for this purpose.
“Basically,” says Daniel Welling, assistant professor of climate and space sciences at the University of Michigan, “the bill is to have these bodies advise the nation on how to proceed in trying to understand and establish benchmarks for weather forecasting. space”.
At the moment, this is not easy to do. For one thing, space weather is still something of a black box for researchers. On the other hand, even if we could predict it with the same reliability as we can predict Earth’s climate, the US electrical grid is so extensive and regionalized that it is difficult to establish protocols to protect everything.
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A proof-of-concept example of what this type of command and control system would look like, however, exists in New Zealand.
Just over a year ago, Welling worked with a team from TranspotencyO owner and operator the country’s national network,
modeling an extreme solar storm estimate and then changing the network configuration until it was stable. This has been summarized in a PDF procedure that sits on Transpower operators’ desks. “They activated it [past] weekend,” says Welling, “which is really cool.”
But a nation of 5.1 million people, covering 103,500 square miles, is different from a nation like the USA, with its 333 million people and 3.8 million square miles. And if a storm occurred that destroyed the grid, our power systems would likely go down. However, this is not for lack of machines and protocols in development. Power plant transformers operate on alternating current, but during solar storms they can receive direct current surges.
“These transformers aren’t made to handle that, so they can heat up, sometimes very quickly,” says Welling.
A piece of hardware known as a geomagnetically induced current (GIC) blocker could be installed on transformers to protect them from destructive pulses of power. The problem is that GIC blockers are still in development and when they are installed, they can have what Welling calls the Whac-A-Mole effect. “You turned off the current [from the solar storm] here and double there,” he says.
This leaves transformers vulnerable – and vulnerable transformers are a very bad thing. “The transformers are the size of your living room, custom-made and shipped from overseas,” says Welling. If they are damaged or destroyed during a storm, it can take “weeks or more to recover,” he adds.
Managing potential damage to satellites is easier. One of the big risks here is phantom commands that cause satellites to behave abnormally. The solution is to send them repeated “spam commands,” basically reminding them over and over again to keep working as they should. Careful trajectory monitoring can allow operators to fire satellite thrusters in appropriate bursts, preventing orbits from deteriorating due to atmospheric drag.
Both pipelines and rail systems can also present problems, since any long metal conductor based in the ground can carry current during a geomagnetic storm. In the case of ducts, there isn’t much controllers can do other than monitor them for damage that could be caused by the current. In the case of trains, Welling says, rail traffic controllers know not to rely on automatic signals during a geomagnetic storm and will instead take control manually. A similar rule applies to the oil industry and some aspects of the military that rely heavily on GPS systems.
“These sectors will suspend operations until everything is resolved,” says Welling.
Air traffic controllers must also react, diverting planes from locations that are experiencing communications outages, or grounding planes entirely if the lack of communications is more global. And the health of passengers will require avoiding areas where high levels of dangerous radiation are present.
Last weekend, Welling says, “there were flights that normally fly over the pole that were diverted to lower latitudes due to radiation risk.”
For now, these decidedly imperfect protocols are the best measures the US and most of the rest of the world have. Not only do we need to develop better preventive and corrective solutions, but the business of space weather forecasting needs to improve dramatically. And that can take a long time.
“There’s a saying that space weather is 50 years behind meteorology in terms of predictions and statistics,” says Welling. “The events of [last] weekend really made that saying resonate with me.”
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
