10 days of darkness of the Internet?

Growing risk of once-in-a-century solar superstorm that could knock out internet, study says

https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/sci-tech/growing-risk-of-once-in-a-century-solar-superstorm-that-could-knock-out-internet-study-says-1.5579689

Imagine if one day the internet was down not just in your neighbourhood, but across the globe, knocked out by a threat from space: an enormous solar superstorm.

It sounds like science fiction, but a new study says it could become our reality earlier than we think if we don’t prepare properly for the next time the sun spits a wave of magnetized plasma at us.

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Blackout-causing 'super' solar storms happen more often than we thought

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/news/article/blackout-causing-super-solar-storms-happen-more-often-than-we-thought

Powerful solar storms pose a great danger to our technologies here on Earth, and space weather scientists just determined that we see these storms far more often than we thought, possibly up to once every 25 years.

In September of 1859, while observering sunspots with his telescope, astronomer Richard Carrington witnessed what is still considered to be the most powerful solar flare ever seen. Just days later, the event was followed by intense auroral displays that were visible all the way to the equator. Long distance telegraph lines became so charged with electricity that operators suffered shocks, and for days after they could even send messages without hooking the system up to a power source. In the aftermath, Carrington linked the events, effectively discovering 'space weather' for the very first time.

Decades later, in July of 2012, satellites observing the Sun spotted an immense cloud of plasma - a coronal mass ejection - erupting into space. Detailed computer modelling revealed that if this rapidly expanding cloud had erupted just two weeks earlier, it would have scored a direct hit on Earth, causing another "Carrington-level" solar storm. Lloyds of London performed a study that showed, based on the impacts of the Carrington Event, if Earth had taken a direct hit from the 2012 solar storm, it would have caused world-wide blackouts and satellite failures, with a pricetag to the global economy totalling in the trillions of dollars.

Even now, nearly eight years after the event, it is possible some parts of the world would have still been trying to recover.

These two events are excellent examples of just how dangerous space weather can be, and a new study performed by scientists with the University of Warwick and the British Antarctic Survey now shows that solar storms severe enough to impact our technologies can occur as often as once every 25 years.

"Our research shows that a super-storm can happen more often than we thought," Richard Horne, a space weather researcher at the British Antarctic Survey who co-authored the paper, said in an American Geophysical Union blog post. "Don't be misled by the stats. It can happen any time. We simply don't know when, and right now we can’t predict when."

Understanding just how big solar flares can get

https://astronomy.com/news/2021/09/understanding-just-how-big-solar-flares-can-get

Recasting the iconic Carrington Event as just one of many superstorms in Earth’s past, scientists reveal the potential for even more massive, and potentially destructive, eruptions from the Sun

On May 1, 2019, the star next door erupted.

In a matter of seconds, Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our Sun, got thousands of times brighter than usual — up to 14,000 times brighter in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum. The radiation burst was strong enough to split any water molecules that might exist on the temperate, Earth-sized planet orbiting that star; repeated blasts of that magnitude might have stripped the planet of any atmosphere.

It would be bad news if the Earth’s sun ever got so angry.

But the Sun does have its moments — most famously, in the predawn hours of Sep. 2, 1859. At that time, a brilliant aurora lit up the planet, appearing as far south as Havana. Folks in Missouri could read by its light, while miners sleeping outdoors in the Rocky Mountains woke up and, thinking it was dawn, started making breakfast. “The whole of the northern hemisphere was as light as though the Sun had set an hour before,” the Times of London reported a few days later.

Meanwhile, telegraph networks went haywire. Sparks flew from equipment — some of which caught on fire — and operators in Boston and Portland, Maine, yanked telegraph cables from batteries but kept transmitting, powered by the electrical energy surging through the Earth.

The events of that Friday evoked biblical descriptions. “The hands of angels shifted the glorious scenery of the heavens,” reported the Cincinnati Daily Commercial. The actual impetus was a bit more prosaic: The skies had been set ablaze by an enormous blob of electrically charged gas, shot out from the Sun following a flash of light known as a solar flare.