Death Star: How Our Own Sun Could Destroy Human Civilization - The Daily Grail
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Despite popular misconceptions, the Sun is not a stable, unchanging, eternal, ball of fire in the sky. Indeed, from an astrophysical and geological perspective, the Sun is quite the opposite. Fueled by nuclear fusion reactions, it is unstable, continually seething and churning, in disequilibrium, discharging not only visible light, but also a large energy array across the electromagnetic spectrum, and belting out charged particles as well. While the Sun may have little hiccups from time to time, it can also […]

This article was written in 2012 by Boston U. geophysicist Robert M. Schoch. It’s no less true in any way today (although power companies are somewhat better prepared thanks to articles like this one - and they were nervous last week).

Auroras would be much easier to see if it this happened and the lights went out for months. Website:www.robertschoch.com

  • perestroika@slrpnk.net
    0·
    5 months ago

    I noticed a journalist mention (hopefully based on good sources) that this months’s storm was estimated to be 4-5 times weaker than the 1859 storm.

    NASA, in their article mentions the recent storm as a G5 level geomagnetic storm caused by an X8.7 level solar flare.

    X is the strongest class of solar flares and G is the strongest class of geomagnetic storms, but this was definitely not a record - an X20 flare has been observed once, but as I understand, the ejected particles didn’t hit Earth.

    Where I live (latitude 59), a short electrical grid event occurred during the display of auroras. Something tripped and something immediately switched over to replace it, most people didn’t notice anything, but some had to restart various heat pumps and similar devices. Then again, in Europe, the power grid has relatively short lines and many transformers between them, which makes it comparatively less vulnerable.