On September 1, 1859, British astronomer Richard Carrington was investigating a strange collection of dark blobs in the sun’s atmosphere when a bright burst of light caught his attention. Shining for nearly five minutes, The Flash would later make history as the first recording solar flare observed at all – but Carrington’s name would eventually become synonymous with the violent solar storm that hit Earth less than 48 hours later.
called now Carrington eventThe accelerating storm of electrically charged particles set telegraph offices ablaze and caused colorful aurorae as far south as Cuba and Hawaii. To this day, the Carrington Event is the most intense solar storm in recorded history. And those black spots that Carrington was studying – called planet-sized vast regions of pent-up magnetic energy sunspots — he could have provided ample evidence that something bad was on its way.
Unbeknownst to Carrington, but well understood by modern astronomers, the size and quantity of sunspots visible at a given moment is directly related to the 11-year cycle of the Sun’s electromagnetic activity. As larger and larger sunspots appear, the sun will usually converge towards the apogee of its cycle, known as the solar maximum. As the maximum approaches, solar weather phenomena such as solar flares and Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — the massive blobs of plasma that speed through space and cause storms like the Carrington event when colliding with Earth’s atmosphere — are also becoming more common.
We don’t have to guess what the sun looked like before the Carrington event. Carrington himself drew a sketch of the sunspots he saw facing Earth and later submitted the sketches to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The images show a large group of dark blobs that Carrington estimated should collectively be about the same width as Jupiter. a 2019 re-analysis of his drawings published in the journal space climate It was estimated that the spots spanned between 9% and 14% of the width of the solar disk.
That’s huge for a group of sunspots, but it’s almost unheard of. according to Spaceweather.comScientists observed a sunspot of approximately equal size in November 2003, prior to The most powerful solar flare in modern times flashed to life. (Fortunately, the resulting CME only skimmed the ground and didn’t result in widespread damage.) For a sense of scale, Spaceweather edited the Carrington sunspot graphics in a satellite image from 2003’s Sunspot, to show the monsters side by side.
Sunspot activity increased dramatically in early 2023, with sunspot numbers far exceeding NASA projections each month — though nothing of the size of a sunspot has been seen at Carrington yet. However, the abundance of sunspots and other solar weather indicates that the next solar maximum will arrive faster and stronger than NASA previously predicted. Whether the next maximum brings a Carrington-scale storm with it is a matter of pure chance — but scientists will continue to watch for spotty signs on the sun, just in case.
“Beer aficionado. Gamer. Alcohol fanatic. Evil food trailblazer. Avid bacon maven.”