Greenland Ice Hid Signs Of A 2600-Year-Old Solar Storm

in #science5 years ago

Sometimes, our Sun like to party and fires off one hell of a solar storm straight at the Earth.

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The Sun might seem like a nice calm yellow dwarf-type star if you take just a casual glance at it. But, that’s not always the case. Sometimes, it likes to be wild. And when it does wild solar storms rock the whole solar system. Now a recent research in the ice of Greenland showed evidence of an ultimate solar storm that hit the Earth about 2600 years ago.

When a big solar eruption or a coronal ejection takes place proton storms – floods of high-energy particles radiated by the Sun and sped up to relativistic speeds – appear. These protons are a danger to electronics and anyone who is in the atmosphere or in orbit. They are capable of starting a geomagnetic storm capable of devastating electrical grids. And while researchers have been studying them for decades they still have no idea how often we can expect them to happen.

The best known such event is the Carrington event from 1859. This was the strongest solar storm about which we have records. When it comes to something further down in time, we need experts who concern themselves from ancient history. One of them is Raimund Muscheler from the Lunds Universitet in Sweden. He and his colleagues found another extreme solar event in ice from Greenland. Muscheler and his coworkers found radioactive isotopes in the ice from Greenland that suggests an extreme proton storm hit the Earth about 2610 years ago. A lot of beryllium-10 and chlorine-36 isotopes were found in the ice.

As far as we know, similar wild proton storms took place in 774 (or 775) AD and 993 (or 994) AD. This shows that we have at least three extreme solar events just in the past three thousand years. And yes, at least, as many of the event may have not been discovered yet.

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Hi @kralizec .... Amazing post with useful knowledge...

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