June 8, 2021 • 25 mins
When amateur astronomer Richard Carrington gazed through his telescope on the morning of September 1st, 1859, he noticed something weird about the surface of the sun -- it seemed to have clusters of dark spots. Later historians would recognize this as the earliest observation of a solar flare -- and a little less than 18 hours later, the associated coronal mass ejection would wreak havoc on Earth, setting telegraphs aflame, lighting up the night sky and causing many to wonder whether it was the end of the world.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Shout out to our super producer,
Casey Pagram. Shout out to our super producer, the one
and only Max Williams, and no shout out to you man.
It's we We both had some weird weekends. Who are
Do you know what that is? Is that a thing
(00:48):
that this is like a military thing? Or is that
something that al Pacino says an scent of a woman.
I've always associated it with the military, but that may
be due to my upbring, got it. I don't know
why I said that just now. It's just for some reason.
Every time I'm on a show and someone else does
the insure, I just always feel compelled to chime in
(01:09):
with hua and I never do it. But I decided
to do it today. Decided to indulge myself this time.
I'm noll. By the way, we're not talking about the
military today. Well, I mean it might enters in. We're
gonna talk about military communications and that kind of technology,
but we're talking about natural phenomena, something kind of in
the realm of things. We might discuss on another show
(01:29):
we do stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah,
and if you were to ask me, hey, Ben Bolan,
since I haven't introduced myself yet, what's the deal with
the sun? Well, I would say it depends upon your perspective.
The Sun is both the giver of life to everything,
from us doing the show you're listening today and the
(01:50):
dog who is apparently a big fan of ours barking
in the background. But the Sun is also a source
of great potential danger. We know that at some point
the Sun will consume this planet, but it's a it's
a long way away, hopefully. The problem is that the
(02:10):
Sun is not content like some lovecrafty and monster to
just slumber away until the end of days. No, the
Sun is alive in its own way. It's very active
and as you said, Nol on our other shows, stuff
they don't want you to know. We've talked at length
about some of the perhaps unexpected dangers that the Sun
(02:34):
can pose, everything from you know, some as small as
sun burned to a CME or coronal mass ejection. And
today's episode is about uh coronal mass ejection, a disaster
from the sun. It's something we know today as the
Carrington event of eighteen fifty nine. No, you want to
(02:59):
set the stage four, man, I sure do. Ben. So,
in the morning the wee hours of September one, eighteen
fifty nine, a gentleman by the name of Richard Harrington,
who you could describe as sort of a hobbyist, an
astronomer hobbyist. He noticed and observed and sketched a kind
of bizarre looking cluster of sun spots. It was an
(03:21):
area in the sky that basically erupted and created this
bright flash that generated a ton of energy that you know,
came from the Sun, and it creates this magnetic field
that is then released and shot billions of tons of
sun material, star stuff, I don't know, whatever you want
(03:42):
to call it, towards the Earth. Essentially, he looks at
all of this and what that is that that he
were describing and that he was seeing and describing and
his sketches was a solar flare. And then following that
solar flare, you get what you described, Ben, something called
a coronal mass ejection that actually hit the Earth a
mere seventeen hours later and created essentially what you would
(04:05):
call a geo magnetic storm of such intensity that it
would be felt across the entire planet in multiple ways. Yeah,
that's true. And when we say star stuff here, we're
not too far off. We're taking only a tiny bit
of stylistic license. See. I mean, your coronal mass ejection
(04:26):
can eject billions of tons of what is technically known
as coronal material and carry along with it an embedded
magnetic field. This is where things get pretty dicey. Later
that night, after Carrington has witnessed this, telegraph communications across
(04:47):
the planet start to fail. They stutter out, and then
they go dark, and people started reporting again all across
the world. Sparks flying from telegraph machines. Operators were getting
electric shocks, papers were setting on fire, and these auroras,
colorful auroras, illuminated the nighttime sky. It looked beautiful, but
(05:13):
they were incredibly bright. Birds thought it was daytime. The
day birds began their morning chirping. People who went to
work in the morning started their daily chores because they
thought the sun had come up. It's the opposite of
our earlier episode when people thought the day had ended.
(05:34):
If you'll you'll remember that one, right, which was probably
a volcanic explosion. Oh no, it was probably a forest fire,
that's what it was. And some some folks, just like
in our forest fire situation, were certain that the end
of the world was at hand, and it was Carrington
who knew the truth. This would later come to be
(05:57):
recognized as a solar flare with the energy of get this,
ten billion atomic bombs and that it's insane to hear that, right,
But obviously it had time to dissipate, you know, I
mean the fact that the Sun is how many miles
away in spaces the Sun ben I'm bad at space math.
I'm bad at directions in general, but uh, in particular
(06:20):
space directions, the Sun is about let's see, we'll use
the U S system. It's about ninety four point three
four five million miles from Earth. And that distance if
you measure things in space terms, if you had a
little space ruler, you would call that distance one astronomical
(06:41):
unit or a U or fifty thousand parsecs. No, that's
not a thing. That's a star Star Wars thing that
I think doesn't even make sense, even like Star Wars
buffs like say, par sex is not a measure of
speed or something like that. I don't know. You Star
Wars nerds out there, correct me. Oh, you know what
I should point out too, for an aster physicists or
(07:02):
astronomers in the crowd, the Sun is currently as we
record point three four or five million miles away, but
we uh here on Earth, we get closer and further
at different times, so the average is something more like thousand,
nine hundred fifty five, eight hundred and seven miles totally.
(07:23):
So I'm sorry, I got real effer say. My point
is ten billion atomic bombs worth of energy dissipating over
millions of miles and still having such a massive impact
on people's day to day lives all over the world.
That really speaks something to the the power of the Sun.
It's true, and we also have to consider there's a
(07:45):
bit of a lottery here. It's a little bit of
gambling because Earth happened to be in the wrong place
at the wrong time, or in the right place at
the right time. If you're a fan of if you're
a fan of solar disasters. The big question, though, comes
down to how Richard Carrington figured this out. He was
(08:12):
a gentleman of means, he was a man of leisure,
and he didn't need to get up every day and
slept for his daily bread. Like so many other people
during this time. Since he had so much free time,
and since he did have the financial means to support
his curiosities, he got really into studying what was called
(08:33):
natural philosophy, And in natural philosophy he focused on the
field of astronomy. He didn't look at the night sky
so much, though, the way so many other astronomers did. Instead,
he studied the sun, and in his studies he would
monitor changes on the solar surface his best he could tell,
(08:55):
and he would try to make correlations and predictions based
on the previous data he had obtained. And that's why
he knew something was up, something was irregular in that
early morning on September one. It makes sense, doesn't it beend,
given you know, the availability of technology in the late
(09:16):
eighteen hundreds, that you would study, like if you're into stars,
you would study the closest one to you. Yeah, it's
kind of weird that other people hadn't, at least to
this degree. So here's what he did. This is how
well off he is. He's got a country estate outside
of London, is his state has a private observatory. Because
(09:38):
this is the kind of guy who might have had
a garden hermit. You know, that's how well off he is.
So he has a shutter over his dome and he
cranks it open slowly. He looks at the clear blue
sky in front of him. He takes his telescope, points
it towards the sun to brass telescope, and as he's
looking at the sun, he notices this cluster of enormous
(10:01):
dark spots that we mentioned earlier. They're kind of like
freckles or moles if you have any of those. Maybe
it's a dumb question, Ben, but aren't you, like not
supposed to look directly into the sun, let alone with
the giant magnifying instrument. Yeah, yeah, it's it's not the
best move typically to look at the sun with the
unaided eye, and it's especially damaging during an eclipse, which
(10:23):
is why you need to wear special spectacles. But nonetheless,
this was Carrington's bag, and he looked at the sun,
and like you said, Ben, he saw these kind of
eruptions coming from those clusters that you describe those sun spots.
And this is something he did every day, but today
was a little bit different. At eleven eighteen am by
local time, he could really see change happening in these
(10:47):
sun spots that he he was used to kind of
observing that moved across the entire face of the sun
spot and then gradually faded out and then disappeared. So honestly,
the biggest factor in Carrington's fiver was timing. Right. He
literally happened to see the event that led to the
event right the upper case all caps events that we're
(11:09):
going to describe shortly. He immediately thought maybe something was
up with his telescope, uh, that something was was damaged
or broken. Um. And after you know, taking a look
and seeing what was going on with it, he found
it to be in perfect working condition. And then realized
that he had seen something very special and particularly unusual, right,
(11:30):
and being a fledgling scientist, he at least knew that
he needed confirmation, So it wasn't just a matter of
he said, sun said situation. So he ran out to
grab someone possibly in my head his nearby garden. He said,
he come look at this telescope. Quickly, look sat on
these said on these phone books, and take a look
(11:50):
through this telescope and look at oh, yes, scard to hermit,
that's a good correction and so he said, yes, my
hermits come come from your meditations and staff through my
brass telescope for the Sun's misbehaving. But when he got
whomever it was there to be a second witness, he
felt like a real dunderhead because the spots had already
(12:14):
quote much changed and enfeebled. All in all, the thing
he saw around eighteen that morning was an event that
lasted less than five minutes, but during those five minutes,
giga tons, according to Hackaday dot com of charged particles
were blasted from the surface of the Sun and they
(12:37):
rode the Sun's magnetic flux, so that within about seventeen
to eighteen hours they would start hitting planet Earth. And
to understand why Carrington was somewhat unique or somewhat distinct
and noticing this, we have to talk a little bit
about the concept of solar science. If we're being charitable,
(13:00):
we can say modern solar sciences in its infancy in
eighteen fifty nine. And the reason he was able to
not damage his eyes is because his telescope was well
was crued by today's standards, of course, but it projected
an image onto a white card, and that was how
(13:22):
he was able to avoid a lot of eye damage.
If you look at the Sun through a telescope without protection,
now it can damage drive to be very careful. He
wasn't the only person studying the Sun. Other astronomers have
begun to sort of ferret out its secrets, and they discovered,
perhaps most importantly, that the Sun appeared to have a cycle.
(13:43):
The number of sun spots in their locations on the
Sun's face kind of occurred in a pattern. And then
they knew that they also have pieced together this stuff.
It's kind of like a mystery that they're investigating because
they could say, Okay, we know these sun spots seem
to happen on this rough cycle, and then we know
that when these sun spots occur, we can see stuff
(14:06):
happen on Earth. We can see stuff like the Aurora
Borealis or the Aurora australis, and we know that there's
a clear association between solar activity and the magnetic field
that surrounds our planets. And even at this time, this
is so fascinating, Even at this time, how impressive is this.
(14:27):
Some solar observatories had magnetometers so they could record changes
on Earth and then even more closely correlate them to
solar activity. That is so cool, and just really quickly
just to let's let's talk a little bit about what
this coronal mass ejection is again. I picture in my
mind when I hear this, you know, eruption of material
(14:50):
from the Sun. I picture it more like the Sun
is shooting fireballs at Earth and it's going to land,
you know, and annihilate us like the meteor in you know, um,
what's that movie called with Bruce Willis Where the Arma
Get And that's the one. But it literally is just
you know, these electromagnetic pulses that are super powerful, kind
(15:10):
of along the lines of a man made version called
an e MP that can be deployed to disrupt communications.
It's like literally like a very powerful electromagnet that can
send out these pulses. I think you've seen it in
like heist movies, if it was in Ocean's eleven or
they use it to like shut down vegas, uh for
a brief moment so they can like you know, do
(15:30):
their heisty dirty work. But this is essentially the same concept.
And then these things disrupt electrical fields, um, which is
this is where we're gonna get to. But you're right,
then the technology of the time is a lot more
impressive than I would have thought. I mean, it is
practically nineteen hundred. And studying of the Sun, you know,
obviously has gone back as far as like people looked
at the Sun and we're like, what's that. But you
(15:52):
have like Copernicus, for example, who studied the Sun in
the fifteen hundreds and developed this, you know, heliocentric view
of the universe, which obviously was proved to be incorrect.
We know that the Sun is not in fact the
center of of the universe, but it is the Earth.
I love the idea of helio centric view because it
reminds me of some of the anti science movements that
(16:15):
have arisen at various times in human history, where they'll say, well,
your science maybe all well and good, but it remains
my view that the universe is heliocentric exactly. No, it's
totally true. So we've got you're making a great point here.
We also have to point out that this is something
a lot of average people would not have been aware of,
(16:37):
say your average telegraph operator. They probably did not wake
up anticipating the extent of just how bad their day
would become, and the stuff that Carrington was lucky enough
to see was only one of multiple outbursts that the
Sun would have over the next several days. M Hm,
(17:06):
that what a naughty sun. I love the idea of
the Sun having out versts, just like you know, pitching
a fit, having a tantrum, kicking and screaming. It needs
a nap, It really needs a nap. It needs a snack.
It does. And it's it's always kind of on the sun,
you know. I mean, I think it's a good point,
but yeah. And other solar observers, you know, even professional ones,
(17:27):
had also reported these large numbers of sun spots beginning
on August of that year, with a very strong aurora
effect being seen at particularly low altitudes beginning at night.
If we think of an aurora, we usually think of
the two, the Northern lights and the southern lights, the
Aurora borealis and the Aurora austrialis right, yep. And this
(17:51):
suggested that at least one, probably more of these sun
spots had created a solar flare and then a subsequent
CME that was strong enough to fling plasma and coronal
matter towards Earth sometime in the earlier two days, and
they know this because the electro magnetic effects of a
(18:15):
flare are visible two people on Earth about eight minutes
after they occur. But the stuff that actually gets sort
of out there, that's the noise of a CME. Oh no,
I had no doubt, Ben. That is absolutely accurate, right,
because I know a lot of people are gonna say, well,
how can sound work in a vacuum? Don't don't test
(18:37):
the sci fi too much. It is literally and that
stuff takes several days to travel those Uh, let's just
ballpark at nine million miles d fifty million kilometers between
the Sun and the Earth, and those eruptions still as
big as they were, and they are big, they pale
(18:57):
in comparison to that sept Tember first c m E.
That's right, um. And as we've been hinting at and teasing,
the effects of this September one coronal mass ejection or
CME were reported just eighteen hours after Carrington saw what
he saw. So again, it's absolute crazy, perfect timing that
(19:22):
he really did see the very genesis of what would
ultimately become a disaster all over the planet. So what
this suggests was that the previous solar flares had already
begun to clear the space between the Earth and the
Sun so that that plasma could travel faster than its
usual million miles per hour. So potentially that means that
(19:45):
the cime that was experienced on the night of September
two was actually released by an earlier unobserved flare, because
it appears to be this was like a very busy
time for the Sun. The Sun was just having back
to back tantrums here. Um, so we start to see
the effects. Yes, yeah, again, it is quite possible that
(20:06):
there was an earlier unobserved flare, because it's tough to
highlight just how lucky Carrington was to observe this directly
while was happening, or you know, technically eight minutes after
it happened for five minutes. Anyhow, no matter what the
original culprit was, this arriving same caused the kind of
(20:28):
geomagnetic storm you would imagine occurring in a Hollywood blockbuster
today the storm, yes, yea, the Earth's magnetosphere was shoved aside,
like kicked down the stairs basically, and this allowed these
charged particles to get into the atmosphere. They combined with
(20:49):
gas molecules that's what forms those northern and southern lights,
and these lights spread much further than their usual range.
You could see them in areas that were close to
the tropics. People could read newspapers at midnight on the street,
and as we said, they some people in animals like
started their days too early. But these beautiful lights in
(21:13):
the sky were just a backdrop. They were just a
nice silver lining to a very dangerous cloud. The distortion
of Earth's magnetic field eventually reached a point of collapse,
and when that collapsing field released terra watts of energy
back into Earth. People of the Victorian age were actually
(21:35):
quite fortunate. They didn't have a ton of electrical infrastructure,
so most of this current just kind of dissipated, except
for the big communication system of the world at the time,
the telegraph network. Yeah, the telegraph network, which is, you know,
a very rudimentary infrastructure of communication, which essentially these poles
(21:57):
connected together by wires that are amplified. I imagine, I'm
I'm probably doing a very rudimentary job of explaining it.
But there are essentially transformers or some kind of electrical boosting,
you know, equipment that causes those signals to be relayed
from poll to poll. Literally through wires, right, yeah, yeah, exactly.
This is not a wireless system. And there's a lot
(22:20):
of work that has gone into setting up the telegraph system.
It was a hugely vital piece of of communication technology.
You would get news, you would send private messages. You
could do business much more quickly than you could by
say sending a carriage or a messenger pigeon or a
(22:41):
or a goal fashioned letter. Also, telegraph operators were aware
that their system could be compromised by atmospheric activity like
thunderstorms or the northern lights. But this would have been
what would would have been referred to as the wire right,
sending things by wire um. And I believe at this
stage it would have been all through like Morse code,
(23:04):
like taps, you know, you'd have like a device with
a little button on it that you would tap the
message into and then it would be received on the
other end where someone would translate it and then deliver
it correct. Yeah, yeah, that's that's the thing. The telegraph
system did rely on Morse code, which is the telegraph
was primarily used from the eighteen forties into the mid
(23:28):
twentie century. And the reason Morse code was so useful
is because you were coding pulses of electric current through
those wires, so you weren't writing anything. You were doing
dits and dashes and dots. And it's it's funny because
you can learn Morse code pretty easily. There's just a
(23:49):
series of log and short pulses that represent numbers or letters.
But just like when you see somebody transcribing something in
a courtroom, watching somebody actually operate a telegraph is amazing.
They move so quickly, it's it's insane. I'm just tipping
my tipping my podcast hat to anybody who can do
(24:12):
Morse code at that level of speed. They had known
that there would be regional disturbances could affect the system,
but no one had ever experienced a disturbance of this magnitude,
a global disruption. And we're going to we're gonna pause
for a moment here. This is gonna be part one
(24:34):
of our episode on the Carrington event. And trust us, folks,
when we tell you things get even crazier, don't they know,
Like stuff that I want you to know, level crazy,
like the part in the show where things get crazy. Yes,
just so, just so, And we want to thank you
for coming with us on this on this bizarre solar
(24:56):
storm journey. We also want to think, of course, our
superproducers Casey Herb and Max Williams. Not to mention Alex Williams. Yes,
there is a relation. Who composed our theme. Jonathan Strickland,
the Quister. You can see him again real soon if
if he has anything to say about it. Um and
Christopher Hascio is here in Spear and of course are
(25:16):
good pals. Eve's Jeff Coat and our own mad solar scientists.
If solar science was research, Gabe Lousier, I'm excited for
cartoon noal, what about you? You know, I'm always excited
for a two parter band. Well, let's hope. Let's hope
that all our electronics are still working when we get there.
(25:37):
We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts for
my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Shout out to our super producer,
Casey Pagram. Shout out to our super producer, the one
and only Max Williams, and no shout out to you man.
It's we We both had some weird weekends. Who are
Do you know what that is? Is that a thing
(00:48):
that this is like a military thing? Or is that
something that al Pacino says an scent of a woman.
I've always associated it with the military, but that may
be due to my upbring, got it. I don't know
why I said that just now. It's just for some reason.
Every time I'm on a show and someone else does
the insure, I just always feel compelled to chime in
(01:09):
with hua and I never do it. But I decided
to do it today. Decided to indulge myself this time.
I'm noll. By the way, we're not talking about the
military today. Well, I mean it might enters in. We're
gonna talk about military communications and that kind of technology,
but we're talking about natural phenomena, something kind of in
the realm of things. We might discuss on another show
(01:29):
we do stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah,
and if you were to ask me, hey, Ben Bolan,
since I haven't introduced myself yet, what's the deal with
the sun? Well, I would say it depends upon your perspective.
The Sun is both the giver of life to everything,
from us doing the show you're listening today and the
(01:50):
dog who is apparently a big fan of ours barking
in the background. But the Sun is also a source
of great potential danger. We know that at some point
the Sun will consume this planet, but it's a it's
a long way away, hopefully. The problem is that the
(02:10):
Sun is not content like some lovecrafty and monster to
just slumber away until the end of days. No, the
Sun is alive in its own way. It's very active
and as you said, Nol on our other shows, stuff
they don't want you to know. We've talked at length
about some of the perhaps unexpected dangers that the Sun
(02:34):
can pose, everything from you know, some as small as
sun burned to a CME or coronal mass ejection. And
today's episode is about uh coronal mass ejection, a disaster
from the sun. It's something we know today as the
Carrington event of eighteen fifty nine. No, you want to
(02:59):
set the stage four, man, I sure do. Ben. So,
in the morning the wee hours of September one, eighteen
fifty nine, a gentleman by the name of Richard Harrington,
who you could describe as sort of a hobbyist, an
astronomer hobbyist. He noticed and observed and sketched a kind
of bizarre looking cluster of sun spots. It was an
(03:21):
area in the sky that basically erupted and created this
bright flash that generated a ton of energy that you know,
came from the Sun, and it creates this magnetic field
that is then released and shot billions of tons of
sun material, star stuff, I don't know, whatever you want
(03:42):
to call it, towards the Earth. Essentially, he looks at
all of this and what that is that that he
were describing and that he was seeing and describing and
his sketches was a solar flare. And then following that
solar flare, you get what you described, Ben, something called
a coronal mass ejection that actually hit the Earth a
mere seventeen hours later and created essentially what you would
(04:05):
call a geo magnetic storm of such intensity that it
would be felt across the entire planet in multiple ways. Yeah,
that's true. And when we say star stuff here, we're
not too far off. We're taking only a tiny bit
of stylistic license. See. I mean, your coronal mass ejection
(04:26):
can eject billions of tons of what is technically known
as coronal material and carry along with it an embedded
magnetic field. This is where things get pretty dicey. Later
that night, after Carrington has witnessed this, telegraph communications across
(04:47):
the planet start to fail. They stutter out, and then
they go dark, and people started reporting again all across
the world. Sparks flying from telegraph machines. Operators were getting
electric shocks, papers were setting on fire, and these auroras,
colorful auroras, illuminated the nighttime sky. It looked beautiful, but
(05:13):
they were incredibly bright. Birds thought it was daytime. The
day birds began their morning chirping. People who went to
work in the morning started their daily chores because they
thought the sun had come up. It's the opposite of
our earlier episode when people thought the day had ended.
(05:34):
If you'll you'll remember that one, right, which was probably
a volcanic explosion. Oh no, it was probably a forest fire,
that's what it was. And some some folks, just like
in our forest fire situation, were certain that the end
of the world was at hand, and it was Carrington
who knew the truth. This would later come to be
(05:57):
recognized as a solar flare with the energy of get this,
ten billion atomic bombs and that it's insane to hear that, right,
But obviously it had time to dissipate, you know, I
mean the fact that the Sun is how many miles
away in spaces the Sun ben I'm bad at space math.
I'm bad at directions in general, but uh, in particular
(06:20):
space directions, the Sun is about let's see, we'll use
the U S system. It's about ninety four point three
four five million miles from Earth. And that distance if
you measure things in space terms, if you had a
little space ruler, you would call that distance one astronomical
(06:41):
unit or a U or fifty thousand parsecs. No, that's
not a thing. That's a star Star Wars thing that
I think doesn't even make sense, even like Star Wars
buffs like say, par sex is not a measure of
speed or something like that. I don't know. You Star
Wars nerds out there, correct me. Oh, you know what
I should point out too, for an aster physicists or
(07:02):
astronomers in the crowd, the Sun is currently as we
record point three four or five million miles away, but
we uh here on Earth, we get closer and further
at different times, so the average is something more like thousand,
nine hundred fifty five, eight hundred and seven miles totally.
(07:23):
So I'm sorry, I got real effer say. My point
is ten billion atomic bombs worth of energy dissipating over
millions of miles and still having such a massive impact
on people's day to day lives all over the world.
That really speaks something to the the power of the Sun.
It's true, and we also have to consider there's a
(07:45):
bit of a lottery here. It's a little bit of
gambling because Earth happened to be in the wrong place
at the wrong time, or in the right place at
the right time. If you're a fan of if you're
a fan of solar disasters. The big question, though, comes
down to how Richard Carrington figured this out. He was
(08:12):
a gentleman of means, he was a man of leisure,
and he didn't need to get up every day and
slept for his daily bread. Like so many other people
during this time. Since he had so much free time,
and since he did have the financial means to support
his curiosities, he got really into studying what was called
(08:33):
natural philosophy, And in natural philosophy he focused on the
field of astronomy. He didn't look at the night sky
so much, though, the way so many other astronomers did. Instead,
he studied the sun, and in his studies he would
monitor changes on the solar surface his best he could tell,
(08:55):
and he would try to make correlations and predictions based
on the previous data he had obtained. And that's why
he knew something was up, something was irregular in that
early morning on September one. It makes sense, doesn't it beend,
given you know, the availability of technology in the late
(09:16):
eighteen hundreds, that you would study, like if you're into stars,
you would study the closest one to you. Yeah, it's
kind of weird that other people hadn't, at least to
this degree. So here's what he did. This is how
well off he is. He's got a country estate outside
of London, is his state has a private observatory. Because
(09:38):
this is the kind of guy who might have had
a garden hermit. You know, that's how well off he is.
So he has a shutter over his dome and he
cranks it open slowly. He looks at the clear blue
sky in front of him. He takes his telescope, points
it towards the sun to brass telescope, and as he's
looking at the sun, he notices this cluster of enormous
(10:01):
dark spots that we mentioned earlier. They're kind of like
freckles or moles if you have any of those. Maybe
it's a dumb question, Ben, but aren't you, like not
supposed to look directly into the sun, let alone with
the giant magnifying instrument. Yeah, yeah, it's it's not the
best move typically to look at the sun with the
unaided eye, and it's especially damaging during an eclipse, which
(10:23):
is why you need to wear special spectacles. But nonetheless,
this was Carrington's bag, and he looked at the sun,
and like you said, Ben, he saw these kind of
eruptions coming from those clusters that you describe those sun spots.
And this is something he did every day, but today
was a little bit different. At eleven eighteen am by
local time, he could really see change happening in these
(10:47):
sun spots that he he was used to kind of
observing that moved across the entire face of the sun
spot and then gradually faded out and then disappeared. So honestly,
the biggest factor in Carrington's fiver was timing. Right. He
literally happened to see the event that led to the
event right the upper case all caps events that we're
(11:09):
going to describe shortly. He immediately thought maybe something was
up with his telescope, uh, that something was was damaged
or broken. Um. And after you know, taking a look
and seeing what was going on with it, he found
it to be in perfect working condition. And then realized
that he had seen something very special and particularly unusual, right,
(11:30):
and being a fledgling scientist, he at least knew that
he needed confirmation, So it wasn't just a matter of
he said, sun said situation. So he ran out to
grab someone possibly in my head his nearby garden. He said,
he come look at this telescope. Quickly, look sat on
these said on these phone books, and take a look
(11:50):
through this telescope and look at oh, yes, scard to hermit,
that's a good correction and so he said, yes, my
hermits come come from your meditations and staff through my
brass telescope for the Sun's misbehaving. But when he got
whomever it was there to be a second witness, he
felt like a real dunderhead because the spots had already
(12:14):
quote much changed and enfeebled. All in all, the thing
he saw around eighteen that morning was an event that
lasted less than five minutes, but during those five minutes,
giga tons, according to Hackaday dot com of charged particles
were blasted from the surface of the Sun and they
(12:37):
rode the Sun's magnetic flux, so that within about seventeen
to eighteen hours they would start hitting planet Earth. And
to understand why Carrington was somewhat unique or somewhat distinct
and noticing this, we have to talk a little bit
about the concept of solar science. If we're being charitable,
(13:00):
we can say modern solar sciences in its infancy in
eighteen fifty nine. And the reason he was able to
not damage his eyes is because his telescope was well
was crued by today's standards, of course, but it projected
an image onto a white card, and that was how
(13:22):
he was able to avoid a lot of eye damage.
If you look at the Sun through a telescope without protection,
now it can damage drive to be very careful. He
wasn't the only person studying the Sun. Other astronomers have
begun to sort of ferret out its secrets, and they discovered,
perhaps most importantly, that the Sun appeared to have a cycle.
(13:43):
The number of sun spots in their locations on the
Sun's face kind of occurred in a pattern. And then
they knew that they also have pieced together this stuff.
It's kind of like a mystery that they're investigating because
they could say, Okay, we know these sun spots seem
to happen on this rough cycle, and then we know
that when these sun spots occur, we can see stuff
(14:06):
happen on Earth. We can see stuff like the Aurora
Borealis or the Aurora australis, and we know that there's
a clear association between solar activity and the magnetic field
that surrounds our planets. And even at this time, this
is so fascinating, Even at this time, how impressive is this.
(14:27):
Some solar observatories had magnetometers so they could record changes
on Earth and then even more closely correlate them to
solar activity. That is so cool, and just really quickly
just to let's let's talk a little bit about what
this coronal mass ejection is again. I picture in my
mind when I hear this, you know, eruption of material
(14:50):
from the Sun. I picture it more like the Sun
is shooting fireballs at Earth and it's going to land,
you know, and annihilate us like the meteor in you know, um,
what's that movie called with Bruce Willis Where the Arma
Get And that's the one. But it literally is just
you know, these electromagnetic pulses that are super powerful, kind
(15:10):
of along the lines of a man made version called
an e MP that can be deployed to disrupt communications.
It's like literally like a very powerful electromagnet that can
send out these pulses. I think you've seen it in
like heist movies, if it was in Ocean's eleven or
they use it to like shut down vegas, uh for
a brief moment so they can like you know, do
(15:30):
their heisty dirty work. But this is essentially the same concept.
And then these things disrupt electrical fields, um, which is
this is where we're gonna get to. But you're right,
then the technology of the time is a lot more
impressive than I would have thought. I mean, it is
practically nineteen hundred. And studying of the Sun, you know,
obviously has gone back as far as like people looked
at the Sun and we're like, what's that. But you
(15:52):
have like Copernicus, for example, who studied the Sun in
the fifteen hundreds and developed this, you know, heliocentric view
of the universe, which obviously was proved to be incorrect.
We know that the Sun is not in fact the
center of of the universe, but it is the Earth.
I love the idea of helio centric view because it
reminds me of some of the anti science movements that
(16:15):
have arisen at various times in human history, where they'll say, well,
your science maybe all well and good, but it remains
my view that the universe is heliocentric exactly. No, it's
totally true. So we've got you're making a great point here.
We also have to point out that this is something
a lot of average people would not have been aware of,
(16:37):
say your average telegraph operator. They probably did not wake
up anticipating the extent of just how bad their day
would become, and the stuff that Carrington was lucky enough
to see was only one of multiple outbursts that the
Sun would have over the next several days. M Hm,
(17:06):
that what a naughty sun. I love the idea of
the Sun having out versts, just like you know, pitching
a fit, having a tantrum, kicking and screaming. It needs
a nap, It really needs a nap. It needs a snack.
It does. And it's it's always kind of on the sun,
you know. I mean, I think it's a good point,
but yeah. And other solar observers, you know, even professional ones,
(17:27):
had also reported these large numbers of sun spots beginning
on August of that year, with a very strong aurora
effect being seen at particularly low altitudes beginning at night.
If we think of an aurora, we usually think of
the two, the Northern lights and the southern lights, the
Aurora borealis and the Aurora austrialis right, yep. And this
(17:51):
suggested that at least one, probably more of these sun
spots had created a solar flare and then a subsequent
CME that was strong enough to fling plasma and coronal
matter towards Earth sometime in the earlier two days, and
they know this because the electro magnetic effects of a
(18:15):
flare are visible two people on Earth about eight minutes
after they occur. But the stuff that actually gets sort
of out there, that's the noise of a CME. Oh no,
I had no doubt, Ben. That is absolutely accurate, right,
because I know a lot of people are gonna say, well,
how can sound work in a vacuum? Don't don't test
(18:37):
the sci fi too much. It is literally and that
stuff takes several days to travel those Uh, let's just
ballpark at nine million miles d fifty million kilometers between
the Sun and the Earth, and those eruptions still as
big as they were, and they are big, they pale
(18:57):
in comparison to that sept Tember first c m E.
That's right, um. And as we've been hinting at and teasing,
the effects of this September one coronal mass ejection or
CME were reported just eighteen hours after Carrington saw what
he saw. So again, it's absolute crazy, perfect timing that
(19:22):
he really did see the very genesis of what would
ultimately become a disaster all over the planet. So what
this suggests was that the previous solar flares had already
begun to clear the space between the Earth and the
Sun so that that plasma could travel faster than its
usual million miles per hour. So potentially that means that
(19:45):
the cime that was experienced on the night of September
two was actually released by an earlier unobserved flare, because
it appears to be this was like a very busy
time for the Sun. The Sun was just having back
to back tantrums here. Um, so we start to see
the effects. Yes, yeah, again, it is quite possible that
(20:06):
there was an earlier unobserved flare, because it's tough to
highlight just how lucky Carrington was to observe this directly
while was happening, or you know, technically eight minutes after
it happened for five minutes. Anyhow, no matter what the
original culprit was, this arriving same caused the kind of
(20:28):
geomagnetic storm you would imagine occurring in a Hollywood blockbuster
today the storm, yes, yea, the Earth's magnetosphere was shoved aside,
like kicked down the stairs basically, and this allowed these
charged particles to get into the atmosphere. They combined with
(20:49):
gas molecules that's what forms those northern and southern lights,
and these lights spread much further than their usual range.
You could see them in areas that were close to
the tropics. People could read newspapers at midnight on the street,
and as we said, they some people in animals like
started their days too early. But these beautiful lights in
(21:13):
the sky were just a backdrop. They were just a
nice silver lining to a very dangerous cloud. The distortion
of Earth's magnetic field eventually reached a point of collapse,
and when that collapsing field released terra watts of energy
back into Earth. People of the Victorian age were actually
(21:35):
quite fortunate. They didn't have a ton of electrical infrastructure,
so most of this current just kind of dissipated, except
for the big communication system of the world at the time,
the telegraph network. Yeah, the telegraph network, which is, you know,
a very rudimentary infrastructure of communication, which essentially these poles
(21:57):
connected together by wires that are amplified. I imagine, I'm
I'm probably doing a very rudimentary job of explaining it.
But there are essentially transformers or some kind of electrical boosting,
you know, equipment that causes those signals to be relayed
from poll to poll. Literally through wires, right, yeah, yeah, exactly.
This is not a wireless system. And there's a lot
(22:20):
of work that has gone into setting up the telegraph system.
It was a hugely vital piece of of communication technology.
You would get news, you would send private messages. You
could do business much more quickly than you could by
say sending a carriage or a messenger pigeon or a
(22:41):
or a goal fashioned letter. Also, telegraph operators were aware
that their system could be compromised by atmospheric activity like
thunderstorms or the northern lights. But this would have been
what would would have been referred to as the wire right,
sending things by wire um. And I believe at this
stage it would have been all through like Morse code,
(23:04):
like taps, you know, you'd have like a device with
a little button on it that you would tap the
message into and then it would be received on the
other end where someone would translate it and then deliver
it correct. Yeah, yeah, that's that's the thing. The telegraph
system did rely on Morse code, which is the telegraph
was primarily used from the eighteen forties into the mid
(23:28):
twentie century. And the reason Morse code was so useful
is because you were coding pulses of electric current through
those wires, so you weren't writing anything. You were doing
dits and dashes and dots. And it's it's funny because
you can learn Morse code pretty easily. There's just a
(23:49):
series of log and short pulses that represent numbers or letters.
But just like when you see somebody transcribing something in
a courtroom, watching somebody actually operate a telegraph is amazing.
They move so quickly, it's it's insane. I'm just tipping
my tipping my podcast hat to anybody who can do
(24:12):
Morse code at that level of speed. They had known
that there would be regional disturbances could affect the system,
but no one had ever experienced a disturbance of this magnitude,
a global disruption. And we're going to we're gonna pause
for a moment here. This is gonna be part one
(24:34):
of our episode on the Carrington event. And trust us, folks,
when we tell you things get even crazier, don't they know,
Like stuff that I want you to know, level crazy,
like the part in the show where things get crazy. Yes,
just so, just so, And we want to thank you
for coming with us on this on this bizarre solar
(24:56):
storm journey. We also want to think, of course, our
superproducers Casey Herb and Max Williams. Not to mention Alex Williams. Yes,
there is a relation. Who composed our theme. Jonathan Strickland,
the Quister. You can see him again real soon if
if he has anything to say about it. Um and
Christopher Hascio is here in Spear and of course are
(25:16):
good pals. Eve's Jeff Coat and our own mad solar scientists.
If solar science was research, Gabe Lousier, I'm excited for
cartoon noal, what about you? You know, I'm always excited
for a two parter band. Well, let's hope. Let's hope
that all our electronics are still working when we get there.
(25:37):
We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts for
my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
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Noel Brown
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