May 15, 2025 • 15 mins
Unseen photos history
What happens when the Sun lashes out? In this electrifying episode, we explore solar phenomena like solar wind, coronal mass ejections, and the infamous Carrington Event—an intense solar storm that once knocked out telegraph systems. We break down how these space weather events affect Earth’s technology, climate, and atmosphere, and reveal groundbreaking insights from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe that are challenging everything we thought we knew about the Sun. Is the solar wind doing more than just causing auroras? Tune in to uncover the Sun’s mysterious influence on our modern world.
What happens when the Sun lashes out? In this electrifying episode, we explore solar phenomena like solar wind, coronal mass ejections, and the infamous Carrington Event—an intense solar storm that once knocked out telegraph systems. We break down how these space weather events affect Earth’s technology, climate, and atmosphere, and reveal groundbreaking insights from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe that are challenging everything we thought we knew about the Sun. Is the solar wind doing more than just causing auroras? Tune in to uncover the Sun’s mysterious influence on our modern world.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
I think for a moment about the Sun, this massive
powerhouse just hanging out in space. Yeah, looks pretty constant, right.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Right, But appearances can be deceiving. It's actually incredibly dynamical.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Yeah, It's constantly sending out this like stream of energy
and particles that stretches all the way to cross space
to us here.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
On Earth exactly and on today's beyond in for graphics.
That's what we're diving into. The solar wind, this continuous
flow of charged particles from the Sun's.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Corona, and its effects are pretty surprising, right, much bigger
than you might think.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Definitely. We'll look at its history, some dramatic events, but
also the ongoing science how it affects us even today.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Right, things like the auroras obviously, but also you know
space weather impacting our tech. It's all connected to this
solar wind.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Precisely. Understanding it is key, Okay, So let's get into it, right.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Where did this idea even come from this solar wind?
It wasn't always known off yours, well, not at all.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
The story really kicks off back in eighteen fifty nine
there were two astronomers, Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson. They
were working independently, but they both saw the same thing,
the sudden, incredibly bright flash on the Sun.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Yeah, it was the first time anyone actually recorded seeing
a solar flare.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
A solar flare, yeah, but how does that connect to
a wind? Seems like a leap.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Well, almost immediately after that flare, maybe a day or
so later, Earth got hit by this really powerful geomagnetic storm.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Okay, define geomagnetic storm for us quickly.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Think of Earth having this protective magnetic bubble the magnetosphere.
A geomagnetic storm is just a huge disturbance in that bubble.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Gotcha.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
And Carrington, who was apparently a very sharp observer, he
suspected there was a link between the flash he saw
on the Sun and this big magnetic disturbance hitting Earth.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
That's pretty insightful for eighteen fifty nine, But the idea
of the continuous wind wasn't immediate, was.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
It, No, It took a while longer. Later on, George
Fitzgerald suggested the Sun might be sort of regularly throwing
off matter that reaches Earth. But the real theoretical breakthrough
that came much later in the nineteen fifties with Eugene Parker.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Ah Eugene Parker. Like the Parker's Solar Probe.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Is named after the very same Parker developed this comprehensive theory.
He explained how the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, which
is incredibly hot millions of degrees.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Way hotter than the surface, weirdly.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Enough exactly, and because it's so hot, he figured it
must be constantly expanding outwards, creating the supersonic flow.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Of plasma, being that super high gas right electrically.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Charged yep, electrons and ions stripped apart. Parker actually coined
the term solar wind, and he explained how it was
moving fast enough to escape the Sun's gravity.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
So he put the physics behind it. Was it accepted
straight away?
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Not really, No, Apparently his paper faced quite a bit
of skepticism. It was almost rejected for publication, which is
kind of amazing to think about now.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Wow, imagine if that work had just been buried. So
theory's one thing, How did we actually prove it.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Was real out there that needed the space age really
direct measurements. The early Soviet Luna missions like Luna I
and NASA's Mariner two back in the late fifties early sixties,
they carried instruments out into space, and yep, they detected
this flow of particles coming from the Sun, just like
Perker predicted.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Incredible confirmation from space itself. All right, so we know
it's real. Let's go back to that eighteen to fifty
nine storm you mentioned, the Carrington event. Why is that
such a landmark?
Speaker 2 (03:35):
The Carrington event peaking September first and second, eighteen fifty nine,
is well, it's pretty much the benchmark, the most intense
geomagnetic storm in recorded history. It happened during solar cycle ten,
a pretty active time for the Sun.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
And what caused it was it like that flare Carrington saw?
Speaker 2 (03:54):
It was likely caused by something related a coronal mass
ejection or CME. Think of it like a huge unk
of the Sun's atmosphere, plasma and magnetic field just blasting
out into space a CME.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Okay, a solar eruption based.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
A massive one, and this CME slammed into Earth's magnetosphere.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
How fast did it get here? You said, usually it
takes a few days.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
This one was incredibly quick. It covered one hundred and
fifty million kilometers in just seventeen point six hours.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
WHOA, that's fast. Why so speedy.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Well, the thinking is that there might have been a previous,
maybe smaller CME.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
That went out first, uh, clearing the way.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Kind of like clearing the path, Yeah, sweeping aside some
of the slower solar wind that's normally there. So the
big one had less resistance, like an express lane.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
A solar superstorm express. So what did this actually do
on Earth? Back then, pre electrical grid?
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Mostly even without our modern vulnerabilities, the effects were spectacular
and frankly a bit scary. The auroras, the northern and
southern lights were seen almost.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Everywhere, everywhere, like how far south.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Reports came from south central Mexico, Cuba.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Hawaii, why you're kidding, not.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Kidding, Queensland and Australia, southern Japan, China, New Zealand, even
down to Columbia near the equator, places that never see auroras.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
It's absolutely mind blowing. What did they look like?
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Accounts describe them as unbelievably bright, so bright that gold
miners out in the Rocky Mountains actually woke up in
the middle of the night thinking it was dawn.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
And people in the northeastern US reported being able to
read newspapers just by the light of the aurora. One
paper called it a magnificent display, with light greater than
that of the Moon.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
At its full must have been beautiful but also unsettling.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
I imagine so. But it wasn't just pretty lights. It
affected the technology of the.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Day, which was mainly telegraphs exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
The huge disturbance in Earth's magnetic field induced these powerful
electrical currents in the ground. Okay, and these currents found
their way into the long telegraph wires caused chaos across
Europe and North America. Systems failed completely.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Did anything else happen? Like physically?
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Oh yeah, Operators reported getting electric shocks from their equipment.
Sparks were seen literally flying from the telegraph pylons.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Parks flying. That sounds dangerous, It certainly was.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
But here's the really wild part. In some cases, the
induced currents were so strong and steady, yeah, that operators
found they could disconnect their batteries, their normal power supplies
and just keep sending messages using the current generated by
the aurora itself. No way, seriously dead serious. There's a
well documented case of operators in Boston and Portland communicating
for about two hours using only the auroral current That is.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
One of the coolest things I've ever heard. Nature providing
the power. So okay, fast forward to today. If an
event like Carrington happened now, it would be bad.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Bad is an understatement. Catastrophic potentially are dependence on electricity, satellites,
communication networks. It's total.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
What kind of damage are we talking?
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Estimates are hard to pin down exactly, but they into
the trillions of dollars for the US alone. We could
be looking at widespread blackouts lasting weeks, months, maybe even
longer in some areas.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Trillions. And it's not just the lights going at is it.
It's the knock on effects.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Absolutely, think about it. Satellites could be damaged or knocked out. GPS,
weather forecasting, communications, banking systems, transportation networks rely on electricity
and timing signals. Water and sewage systems need power.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Even things like agriculture. Modern farming relies heavily on industrially
produced fertilizers and pesticides, and their production needs power and
complex supply chains. A major disruption could impact global food security.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
That really puts it in perspective. It's a genuine risk
to well modern civilization as we know it.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
It is and some recent work looking back at the
original magnetic recordings from eighteen fifty nine from places like
Q Gardens in London. They digitize those old readings and
they suggest the rate of change in the magnetic field
during the Carrington event was much much faster than even
the most extreme storms we've measured in the modern era.
It was truly off the charts, so.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
It might have been even more powerful than we thought. Okay, okay,
let's shift to our current understanding. What do we know
now about this solar wind? What's it made of? How
does it behave?
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Well, we've learned a huge amount. We know it's mostly
electrons and protons, hydrogen nuclei, plus some alpha particles which
are helium nuclei, and trace amounts of heavier ions like oxygen, carbon, iron.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
All streaming out from the Sun right.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
And crucially, it carries the Sun's magnetic field embedded within it.
We call that the interplanetary magnetic field or IAMT.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
And how fast does it normally move near Earth?
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Say, typically somewhere between two hundred and fifty and seven
hundred and fifty kilometers per second.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
It's still incredibly fast.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Oh yeah, and the density is pretty low out here
maybe three to ten particles per cubic centimeter. It varies though, so.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
It's this constant outflow washing over Earth, and the CMEs
are like gusts or storms within that wind exactly.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
CMEs are the big disruptive events. When one of those
hits Earth's magnetosphere, that's when you get the major geomagnetic storms.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
How does that work? The CME hits the shield, then what.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
It compresses the magnetosphere on the day side, stretches it
out like a long tail. On the night side. It
injects a huge amount of energy and particles. This whole
interaction drastically changes the magnetic field lines, and that induces
those ground currents we talked about like during Carrington. It
also funnels energetic particles down to the atmosphere near the poles,
creating those spectacular auroras and our magnetosphere.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
That's our main defense.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Yeah, absolutely crucial. It deflects the vast majority of the
solar wind particles. Without it, the solar wind would strip
away our atmosphere over time like it probably did on Bars.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
So we're lucky to have it. Are some particles trapped, yes.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Some get trapped in the Van Allen radiation belts, these
zones of high energy particles held in place by our
magnetic field.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Okay, now you mentioned the Parker Solar Probe earlier that's
getting really close to the Sun, right. What's its main goal?
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Its mission is incredible named after Eugene Parker, fittingly, it's
designed to fly into the Sun's corona closer than any
spacecraft ever has to study the origins of the solar
wind directly.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Wow, has it like crossed any key boundaries? Yet?
Speaker 2 (10:18):
It has. It's actually crossed what's called the alphanen surface
that's seen as the boundary where the solar wind transitions
from being sort of bound to the Sun's rotation to
flowing freely outwards at supersonic speeds.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
So it's actually in the solar wind's birthplace essentially. What's
it finding?
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Some really fascinating stuff. One big discovery is these things
called magnetic switchbacks.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Switchbacks like on a mountain road kind of.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
There are these sudden, sharp reversals in the direction of
the magnetic field carried by the solar wind. They only
last for seconds or minutes.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Weird. What causes them?
Speaker 2 (10:49):
The probe's data suggests they might originate low down in
the corona, possibly linked to these magnetic funnel like structures
on the Sun's surface at the edges of giant con cells.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Okay, and why is that important?
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Well, these switchbacks seem to release a lot of energy.
It might be connected to one of the biggest solar mysteries.
Why the corona is millions of degrees hot while the
surface is only thousands. These might be part of the
heating mechanism.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Ah, so maybe solving the coronal heating problem, that'd be huge.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
It could be a major piece of the puzzle. Yeah,
it's changing how we think energy moves out from the Sun.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
What else has Parker shown us?
Speaker 2 (11:27):
It's revealed that the edge of the corona isn't smooth,
it's kind of wrinkly, shaped by these big structures called
coronal streamers. That affects how the solar wind actually starts flying.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Makes sense, a more complex starting point.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Right, And it's detected way more high energy particles accelerated
near the Sun than we expected, and they seem to
follow really complicated paths because the magnetic fields are constantly shifting.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Which is important for predicting space weather. I guess knowing
about those energetic particles definitely.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Understanding where they come from and how they travel helps
us build better for kit models, maybe give astronauts or
satellite operators more warning before dangerous burst arrives.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
So the Sun's even more active and complex up close
than we thought.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Pretty much. Yeah, and Parkerston other cool stuff too. Uses
Venus for gravity assists to get closer to the Sun
right and during those flybys it found Venus has this
unexpectedly long plasma tail trailing behind it like a comet almost.
It even got the first visible light images of Venus's
surface through.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
The clouds Venus with a tail that's wild and commets too.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Yeah. From its unique viewpoint, it's had great close up
looks at comets passing by, helping us understand what they're
made of and how the solar wind interacts with them.
Even helped trace the origin of the Geminid meteor shower.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Wow. So this one probe is rewriting a lot of
textbooks from eighteen fifty nine flares to literally touching the
Sun's atmosphere. But are there still big unanswered questions about
the solar wind?
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Oh? Absolutely, Science always has more questions. For instance, there
was this really strange event back in nineteen ninety nine,
where the solar wind density near Earth dropped to almost
nothing for a couple of days. Wind just stopped, pretty
much disappeared, and it had weird effects like the auroras
appearing directly over the North Pole instead of in the
usual ring shape. We still don't fully understand what causes
(13:18):
those extreme lolls. Huh. It is odd, and there's still
debate about the exact mechanisms that accelerate the solar wind.
We know the corona is hot, but thermal pressure alone
probably isn't enough to get it going that fast. Magnetic
forces waves in the plasma. They must play a crucial role,
but the details are still being worked out.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
So even this constant wind hold secrets.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
It really does, and its influence goes way beyond just Earth.
You know. It shapes comet tails like we said, it
makes distant radio sources seem to twinkle, interplanetary scintillation. It's
likely stripped atmospheres from planets like Mars and Venus over
billions of years because they don't have strong global magnetic
fields like Earth does. Is vital and on the grandest scale,
(14:02):
this wind inflates a giant bubble in the interstellar gas
around our Solar system. That bubble is called the heliosphere.
The solar wind basically finds the boundaries of our son's
influence in the galaxy.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Wow, so this invisible stream is literally shaping our entire
cosmic neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
That's a great way to put it. From that dramatic
Carrington event lighting up telegraph wire.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Yeah, that story is amazing.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
So the continuous subtle ways it interacts with every planet
and defines our Solar system's edge. It's fundamental.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
It really is. Thinking about those operators in eighteen fifty
nine using the Aurora, just incredible resourcefulness. And now we
have Parker named after the guy who theorized it, sending
back data from inside the.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Storm exactly and understanding it isn't just you know, academic
curiosity anymore. With our reliance on technology, understanding space weather
driven by the solar wind and CMEs is vital for
keeping things running, for protecting our infrastructure.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
It really drives home how can connected Earth is to
the Sun, doesn't it? Which makes you wonder, as we
wrap up this beyond infographics deep dive, what other subtle
ways might the Sun be influencing us? Influencing Earth that
we're only just starting to figure out.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
That's the big question, isn't it. There's likely still so
much more to discover.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Definitely something to think about. Well, if you found this
dive into the solar wind as fascinating as we did,
maybe consider giving beyond infographics of five star rating. It
really helps others find the show and do check the description.
There's a link to our website with more discussions like this.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Thanks for tuning in.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Yeah, thanks everyone,
I think for a moment about the Sun, this massive
powerhouse just hanging out in space. Yeah, looks pretty constant, right.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Right, But appearances can be deceiving. It's actually incredibly dynamical.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Yeah, It's constantly sending out this like stream of energy
and particles that stretches all the way to cross space
to us here.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
On Earth exactly and on today's beyond in for graphics.
That's what we're diving into. The solar wind, this continuous
flow of charged particles from the Sun's.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Corona, and its effects are pretty surprising, right, much bigger
than you might think.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Definitely. We'll look at its history, some dramatic events, but
also the ongoing science how it affects us even today.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Right, things like the auroras obviously, but also you know
space weather impacting our tech. It's all connected to this
solar wind.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Precisely. Understanding it is key, Okay, So let's get into it, right.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Where did this idea even come from this solar wind?
It wasn't always known off yours, well, not at all.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
The story really kicks off back in eighteen fifty nine
there were two astronomers, Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson. They
were working independently, but they both saw the same thing,
the sudden, incredibly bright flash on the Sun.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Yeah, it was the first time anyone actually recorded seeing
a solar flare.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
A solar flare, yeah, but how does that connect to
a wind? Seems like a leap.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Well, almost immediately after that flare, maybe a day or
so later, Earth got hit by this really powerful geomagnetic storm.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Okay, define geomagnetic storm for us quickly.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Think of Earth having this protective magnetic bubble the magnetosphere.
A geomagnetic storm is just a huge disturbance in that bubble.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Gotcha.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
And Carrington, who was apparently a very sharp observer, he
suspected there was a link between the flash he saw
on the Sun and this big magnetic disturbance hitting Earth.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
That's pretty insightful for eighteen fifty nine, But the idea
of the continuous wind wasn't immediate, was.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
It, No, It took a while longer. Later on, George
Fitzgerald suggested the Sun might be sort of regularly throwing
off matter that reaches Earth. But the real theoretical breakthrough
that came much later in the nineteen fifties with Eugene Parker.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Ah Eugene Parker. Like the Parker's Solar Probe.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Is named after the very same Parker developed this comprehensive theory.
He explained how the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, which
is incredibly hot millions of degrees.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Way hotter than the surface, weirdly.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Enough exactly, and because it's so hot, he figured it
must be constantly expanding outwards, creating the supersonic flow.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Of plasma, being that super high gas right electrically.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Charged yep, electrons and ions stripped apart. Parker actually coined
the term solar wind, and he explained how it was
moving fast enough to escape the Sun's gravity.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
So he put the physics behind it. Was it accepted
straight away?
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Not really, No, Apparently his paper faced quite a bit
of skepticism. It was almost rejected for publication, which is
kind of amazing to think about now.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Wow, imagine if that work had just been buried. So
theory's one thing, How did we actually prove it.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Was real out there that needed the space age really
direct measurements. The early Soviet Luna missions like Luna I
and NASA's Mariner two back in the late fifties early sixties,
they carried instruments out into space, and yep, they detected
this flow of particles coming from the Sun, just like
Perker predicted.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Incredible confirmation from space itself. All right, so we know
it's real. Let's go back to that eighteen to fifty
nine storm you mentioned, the Carrington event. Why is that
such a landmark?
Speaker 2 (03:35):
The Carrington event peaking September first and second, eighteen fifty nine,
is well, it's pretty much the benchmark, the most intense
geomagnetic storm in recorded history. It happened during solar cycle ten,
a pretty active time for the Sun.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
And what caused it was it like that flare Carrington saw?
Speaker 2 (03:54):
It was likely caused by something related a coronal mass
ejection or CME. Think of it like a huge unk
of the Sun's atmosphere, plasma and magnetic field just blasting
out into space a CME.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Okay, a solar eruption based.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
A massive one, and this CME slammed into Earth's magnetosphere.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
How fast did it get here? You said, usually it
takes a few days.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
This one was incredibly quick. It covered one hundred and
fifty million kilometers in just seventeen point six hours.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
WHOA, that's fast. Why so speedy.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Well, the thinking is that there might have been a previous,
maybe smaller CME.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
That went out first, uh, clearing the way.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Kind of like clearing the path, Yeah, sweeping aside some
of the slower solar wind that's normally there. So the
big one had less resistance, like an express lane.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
A solar superstorm express. So what did this actually do
on Earth? Back then, pre electrical grid?
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Mostly even without our modern vulnerabilities, the effects were spectacular
and frankly a bit scary. The auroras, the northern and
southern lights were seen almost.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Everywhere, everywhere, like how far south.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Reports came from south central Mexico, Cuba.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Hawaii, why you're kidding, not.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Kidding, Queensland and Australia, southern Japan, China, New Zealand, even
down to Columbia near the equator, places that never see auroras.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
It's absolutely mind blowing. What did they look like?
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Accounts describe them as unbelievably bright, so bright that gold
miners out in the Rocky Mountains actually woke up in
the middle of the night thinking it was dawn.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
And people in the northeastern US reported being able to
read newspapers just by the light of the aurora. One
paper called it a magnificent display, with light greater than
that of the Moon.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
At its full must have been beautiful but also unsettling.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
I imagine so. But it wasn't just pretty lights. It
affected the technology of the.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Day, which was mainly telegraphs exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
The huge disturbance in Earth's magnetic field induced these powerful
electrical currents in the ground. Okay, and these currents found
their way into the long telegraph wires caused chaos across
Europe and North America. Systems failed completely.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Did anything else happen? Like physically?
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Oh yeah, Operators reported getting electric shocks from their equipment.
Sparks were seen literally flying from the telegraph pylons.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Parks flying. That sounds dangerous, It certainly was.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
But here's the really wild part. In some cases, the
induced currents were so strong and steady, yeah, that operators
found they could disconnect their batteries, their normal power supplies
and just keep sending messages using the current generated by
the aurora itself. No way, seriously dead serious. There's a
well documented case of operators in Boston and Portland communicating
for about two hours using only the auroral current That is.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
One of the coolest things I've ever heard. Nature providing
the power. So okay, fast forward to today. If an
event like Carrington happened now, it would be bad.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Bad is an understatement. Catastrophic potentially are dependence on electricity, satellites,
communication networks. It's total.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
What kind of damage are we talking?
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Estimates are hard to pin down exactly, but they into
the trillions of dollars for the US alone. We could
be looking at widespread blackouts lasting weeks, months, maybe even
longer in some areas.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Trillions. And it's not just the lights going at is it.
It's the knock on effects.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Absolutely, think about it. Satellites could be damaged or knocked out. GPS,
weather forecasting, communications, banking systems, transportation networks rely on electricity
and timing signals. Water and sewage systems need power.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Even things like agriculture. Modern farming relies heavily on industrially
produced fertilizers and pesticides, and their production needs power and
complex supply chains. A major disruption could impact global food security.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
That really puts it in perspective. It's a genuine risk
to well modern civilization as we know it.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
It is and some recent work looking back at the
original magnetic recordings from eighteen fifty nine from places like
Q Gardens in London. They digitize those old readings and
they suggest the rate of change in the magnetic field
during the Carrington event was much much faster than even
the most extreme storms we've measured in the modern era.
It was truly off the charts, so.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
It might have been even more powerful than we thought. Okay, okay,
let's shift to our current understanding. What do we know
now about this solar wind? What's it made of? How
does it behave?
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Well, we've learned a huge amount. We know it's mostly
electrons and protons, hydrogen nuclei, plus some alpha particles which
are helium nuclei, and trace amounts of heavier ions like oxygen, carbon, iron.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
All streaming out from the Sun right.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
And crucially, it carries the Sun's magnetic field embedded within it.
We call that the interplanetary magnetic field or IAMT.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
And how fast does it normally move near Earth?
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Say, typically somewhere between two hundred and fifty and seven
hundred and fifty kilometers per second.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
It's still incredibly fast.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Oh yeah, and the density is pretty low out here
maybe three to ten particles per cubic centimeter. It varies though, so.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
It's this constant outflow washing over Earth, and the CMEs
are like gusts or storms within that wind exactly.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
CMEs are the big disruptive events. When one of those
hits Earth's magnetosphere, that's when you get the major geomagnetic storms.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
How does that work? The CME hits the shield, then what.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
It compresses the magnetosphere on the day side, stretches it
out like a long tail. On the night side. It
injects a huge amount of energy and particles. This whole
interaction drastically changes the magnetic field lines, and that induces
those ground currents we talked about like during Carrington. It
also funnels energetic particles down to the atmosphere near the poles,
creating those spectacular auroras and our magnetosphere.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
That's our main defense.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Yeah, absolutely crucial. It deflects the vast majority of the
solar wind particles. Without it, the solar wind would strip
away our atmosphere over time like it probably did on Bars.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
So we're lucky to have it. Are some particles trapped, yes.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Some get trapped in the Van Allen radiation belts, these
zones of high energy particles held in place by our
magnetic field.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Okay, now you mentioned the Parker Solar Probe earlier that's
getting really close to the Sun, right. What's its main goal?
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Its mission is incredible named after Eugene Parker, fittingly, it's
designed to fly into the Sun's corona closer than any
spacecraft ever has to study the origins of the solar
wind directly.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Wow, has it like crossed any key boundaries? Yet?
Speaker 2 (10:18):
It has. It's actually crossed what's called the alphanen surface
that's seen as the boundary where the solar wind transitions
from being sort of bound to the Sun's rotation to
flowing freely outwards at supersonic speeds.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
So it's actually in the solar wind's birthplace essentially. What's
it finding?
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Some really fascinating stuff. One big discovery is these things
called magnetic switchbacks.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Switchbacks like on a mountain road kind of.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
There are these sudden, sharp reversals in the direction of
the magnetic field carried by the solar wind. They only
last for seconds or minutes.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Weird. What causes them?
Speaker 2 (10:49):
The probe's data suggests they might originate low down in
the corona, possibly linked to these magnetic funnel like structures
on the Sun's surface at the edges of giant con cells.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Okay, and why is that important?
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Well, these switchbacks seem to release a lot of energy.
It might be connected to one of the biggest solar mysteries.
Why the corona is millions of degrees hot while the
surface is only thousands. These might be part of the
heating mechanism.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Ah, so maybe solving the coronal heating problem, that'd be huge.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
It could be a major piece of the puzzle. Yeah,
it's changing how we think energy moves out from the Sun.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
What else has Parker shown us?
Speaker 2 (11:27):
It's revealed that the edge of the corona isn't smooth,
it's kind of wrinkly, shaped by these big structures called
coronal streamers. That affects how the solar wind actually starts flying.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Makes sense, a more complex starting point.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Right, And it's detected way more high energy particles accelerated
near the Sun than we expected, and they seem to
follow really complicated paths because the magnetic fields are constantly shifting.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Which is important for predicting space weather. I guess knowing
about those energetic particles definitely.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Understanding where they come from and how they travel helps
us build better for kit models, maybe give astronauts or
satellite operators more warning before dangerous burst arrives.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
So the Sun's even more active and complex up close
than we thought.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Pretty much. Yeah, and Parkerston other cool stuff too. Uses
Venus for gravity assists to get closer to the Sun
right and during those flybys it found Venus has this
unexpectedly long plasma tail trailing behind it like a comet almost.
It even got the first visible light images of Venus's
surface through.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
The clouds Venus with a tail that's wild and commets too.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Yeah. From its unique viewpoint, it's had great close up
looks at comets passing by, helping us understand what they're
made of and how the solar wind interacts with them.
Even helped trace the origin of the Geminid meteor shower.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Wow. So this one probe is rewriting a lot of
textbooks from eighteen fifty nine flares to literally touching the
Sun's atmosphere. But are there still big unanswered questions about
the solar wind?
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Oh? Absolutely, Science always has more questions. For instance, there
was this really strange event back in nineteen ninety nine,
where the solar wind density near Earth dropped to almost
nothing for a couple of days. Wind just stopped, pretty
much disappeared, and it had weird effects like the auroras
appearing directly over the North Pole instead of in the
usual ring shape. We still don't fully understand what causes
(13:18):
those extreme lolls. Huh. It is odd, and there's still
debate about the exact mechanisms that accelerate the solar wind.
We know the corona is hot, but thermal pressure alone
probably isn't enough to get it going that fast. Magnetic
forces waves in the plasma. They must play a crucial role,
but the details are still being worked out.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
So even this constant wind hold secrets.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
It really does, and its influence goes way beyond just Earth.
You know. It shapes comet tails like we said, it
makes distant radio sources seem to twinkle, interplanetary scintillation. It's
likely stripped atmospheres from planets like Mars and Venus over
billions of years because they don't have strong global magnetic
fields like Earth does. Is vital and on the grandest scale,
(14:02):
this wind inflates a giant bubble in the interstellar gas
around our Solar system. That bubble is called the heliosphere.
The solar wind basically finds the boundaries of our son's
influence in the galaxy.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Wow, so this invisible stream is literally shaping our entire
cosmic neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
That's a great way to put it. From that dramatic
Carrington event lighting up telegraph wire.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Yeah, that story is amazing.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
So the continuous subtle ways it interacts with every planet
and defines our Solar system's edge. It's fundamental.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
It really is. Thinking about those operators in eighteen fifty
nine using the Aurora, just incredible resourcefulness. And now we
have Parker named after the guy who theorized it, sending
back data from inside the.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Storm exactly and understanding it isn't just you know, academic
curiosity anymore. With our reliance on technology, understanding space weather
driven by the solar wind and CMEs is vital for
keeping things running, for protecting our infrastructure.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
It really drives home how can connected Earth is to
the Sun, doesn't it? Which makes you wonder, as we
wrap up this beyond infographics deep dive, what other subtle
ways might the Sun be influencing us? Influencing Earth that
we're only just starting to figure out.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
That's the big question, isn't it. There's likely still so
much more to discover.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Definitely something to think about. Well, if you found this
dive into the solar wind as fascinating as we did,
maybe consider giving beyond infographics of five star rating. It
really helps others find the show and do check the description.
There's a link to our website with more discussions like this.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
Thanks for tuning in.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Yeah, thanks everyone,
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