Solar Storm

If an asteroid big enough to knock modern civilization back to the 18^th century appeared out of deep space and buzzed the Earth-Moon system, the near-miss would be instant worldwide headline news.

On July 22^nd, 2014 Earth experienced a close shave just as perilous, but most newspapers didn't mention it. The "impactor" was an extreme solar storm, the most powerful in as much as 150+ years. "If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces," says Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado.

Today on Far Future Horizons we again explore the dangers posed by a sudden devastating electromagnetic pulse (EMP) emanating from the Sun with the acclaimed documentary series Naked Science – Solar Storm.

More than one hundred and fifty years ago a solar storm fried telegraph lines across the world during a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) widely known to astronomers as the Carrington Event.

The Coming Solar Storm

It was recently reported in the news that our planet had a close call with a  Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) in 2012 and narrowly escaped another Carrington Event that could have badly damaged electrical grids and disabled satellites in space.

A 2013 study estimated that a solar storm like the Carrington Event could take a $2.6 trillion bite out of the current global economy.

Today on Far Future Horizons we explore the dangers posed by a sudden devastating electromagnetic pulse (EMP) emanating from the Sun or a deliberate attack from a rogue nation with two very informative video features – the Discovery Channel’s “The Perfect Disaster - Solar Storm” and the National Geographic Channel’s documentary series “Explorer - Electronic Armageddon”.

The Perfect Solar Storm (The Carrington Event)

The Sun has bathed our planet with its eternal light and warmth for some 4.6 billion years and has provided life on earth with the energy to go about its terrestrial business. But, every now and then the Sun shows its full fury in the form of Solar Flares and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs).

A Solar flare is a sudden eruption of hydrogen gas on the surface of the sun, usually associated with sunspots and accompanied by a burst of ultraviolet radiation that is often followed by a magnetic disturbance.

A Coronal Mass ejection is an ejection of material from the solar corona. The ejected material is a plasma consisting primarily of electrons and protons (in addition to small quantities of heavier elements such as helium, oxygen, and iron), plus the entrained coronal magnetic field.

If these two events occur together you have the makings for the perfect solar storm. Just such a thing happened on September 1, 1859 and is widely known in astronomers as the Carrington Event.