Not many people think about space weather—it’s not something we can see or feel. However, it is something that could have a far greater impact on us than any storm on Earth. Henry Wismayer meets the people who spend their lives monitoring solar storms, and explains just why we need to keep an eye on what our sun is doing.
It was also one of the first times a solar event disrupted human technology. As the sky blazed overhead, telegraph operators in America and elsewhere found that Morse code messages sent across electrical wires failed to transmit. In many cases, their machines fizzed and spat fire or short-circuited completely. American Telegraph Company employees in Boston, having disconnected their malfunctioning apparatus, found that they could communicate with Portland, Maine, 100 miles north, using only the auroral current. Unseen, something alien had suffused the telegraph wires with an electrical charge.
What Carrington had witnessed would come to be known as a “white-light flare,” a prelude to a massive CME. As he watched, the points of light became “enfeebled” and then vanished. His famous sketch of the start and end points of the erupting sunspot suggested that, over the course of the eruption, it had migrated 35,000 miles across the photosphere.
More picks from Henry Wismayer
My Dad, the Demigod
“Henry Wismayer lost his dad to cancer at the age of four. He thinks through the ways it has shaped his life.”
The Lessons of Uzbekistan’s Lost Sea
“One of history’s worst environmental disasters is now a tourist attraction. What can it teach us about the fate of humankind?”
The End of Travel
“Driven by the need for a storied life, I relished the opportunity for endless travel. Is that a moment in time, now over?”
