The Tremendous Power Of Solar Storms | Naked Science | Spark

outer space holds a weapon 100 million times more powerful than an atomic bomb one strike and it could black out a continent from the space age to the Stone Age In A Flash the weapon isn't man-made it's our sun it's always a question of when the next one will happen it's not a question of will they suddenly go away we've been hit before we're in its sights [Music] again Quebec March 13th 1989 the city is in the grip of winter temperatures are below freezing Suddenly at 2:44 a.m. a 100 ton Transformer on the Montreal power grid overloads blackout the city is plunged Into Darkness 6 million people left powerless astronomer Sten odenwald explains how the night unfolds all the lights went out uh quite literally it only took about 90 seconds for uh fully operational to complete blackout conditions at dawn the thermometer reads just 8° and the power is still out life or death work runs on emergency generators the blackout lasts 12 hours but the disaster could have been much worse if not for a few Transformers in the US millions of Americans might have lost power too with only a couple of more components damage the entire East Coast would probably have gone down as well but what caused the Transformers to overload so violently why did Quebec Plunge Into Darkness this wasn't a terrorist attack or human error the culprit wasn't of the earth it was the result of a gigantic explosion 93 million miles away on the [Music] sun 3 days before the power Network collapses astronomers at the space weather prediction center in Colorado Monitor and active region on the sun when suddenly a giant explosion bursts from its surface a white flash thousands of miles across and millions of degrees hot 93 million miles later a huge wave of radiation slams into Earth's atmosphere colored lights dance across the night sky from Alaska to Mexico Quebec is hit by an invisible but immense natural phenomenon a solar storm an explosion of the Sun so awesome and a wave of energy so huge it's almost impossible to measure space weather scientist Joe Kunes is blown away by the scale of these storms billions or trillions of tons of matter is thrown off the Sun at a million or so miles per hour and I think it it it bodess towards the difference between terrestrial weather scales where you might have wind speeds in the extreme of hundreds of miles an hour in a very strong hurricane or a tornado to looking out at the solar wind and and the solar wind typically is a million milph the solar storm that hit Quebec is the worst in living memory but worse May strike the Earth in the future and next time we might not be so lucky the sun is capable of producing storms that could black out whole continents North America would be crippled losing the electric power grid even temporarily over an entire continent is a major disruption to the way we operate in the 21st century our lives are more complex and technologically advanced than ever before but the freedom technology brings us could also be our downfall anything relying on the power grid when a solar storm strikes is vulnerable but what causes a solar storm how do they wreak so much Havoc here on Earth and is there any way to protect ourselves from future attacks scientists need to unravel the Mysteries surrounding the Sun and reveal the anatomy of a solar [Music] storm the investigation begins 93 million miles away the sun is a 900,000 M wide ball of gas mainly hydrogen it's so vast you could fit over 1 million Earths inside it with room to spare all the sun's energy is generated deep within its heart at the core temperatures here reach 27 million de thousands of times hotter than Earth's most extreme forest fires every second millions of tons of hydrogen are converted into helium this nuclear fusion produces over 5 million tons of energy the sun radiates more energy in 1 second than the world world has used since time began the byproduct of all this energy is vast amounts of magnetism huge magnetic fields Loop across the surface they Bubble Up from the core and punch hundreds of thousands of miles into the solar atmosphere before plunging back down again these arcs are so vast the Earth could fly through one with 100,000 miles to spare on each side on planets like the Earth every part makes a full revolution around its axis each day but the sun is a dynamic ball of gas its equator rotates in 25 days but the poles take 35 days the magnetic Loops stretch and distort as it turns along each Loop flow billions of tons of superheated plasma electrically charged protons and electrons a single Loop contains the energy equivalent to 10 million volcanoes erupting at once these Loops are sometimes the first sign of an impending solar storm Professor Paul bellan wants to find out how these Loops lead to a solar storm so he recreates the surface of the Sun in his lab we have the main ingredients of what goes on in the sun we set up a magnetic field that is arched we have a plasma there that can conduct electricity just like the Plasma on the sun and we drive an electric current along the arch just like on the sun with all the ingredients of the Sun in place Bellon passes an electric charge through the experiment Bell's work shows the these arcs are unstable they twist and stretch in all directions when they Collide they short circuit like crossed wires all their energy is released in a spark a white hot flash the same phenomenon we see on the Sun a solar flare it's a little bit like seeing a hurricane develop you can see the precursors of something that might blow up on the sun you have currents magnetic fields the currents make forces and if they add up in the right way they you can get very powerful forces that can cause these structures to to blow up Bellon lab flares release only a small amount of energy if the energy packed into a solar flare was Unleashed on Earth the explosion could level whole cities the shock waves would be felt on the other side of the earth nearly all life would be wiped out far stronger than the world's nuclear Arsenal the smallest of the flares are more than a million nuclear bombs going off the largest ones are a million times a million of these bombs going off Dr Carol schriver studies the power of solar flares a large flare is is a vast amount of energy it's it it has no counterpart on Earth One solar flare packs enough energy to power America for thousands of years in 1997 NASA captures this image of the sun's surface the moment after a solar flare explodes it shows a shock wave a ripple racing thousands of miles across the surface it travels so fast it could circle the Earth in less than a minute a solar flare packs a huge punch but it isn't responsible for Quebec's power failure it is the first stage of a devastating Onslaught like the flash from a gun it's the bullet that follows which causes the damage behind nearly all solar flares is a gigantic cloud of radiation and in its sights Earth but its first victims are in outer space for years space scientists have known of the threat posed by solar storms but the sun is unpredictable and sometimes even NASA can be taken by surprise May 14th 1973 America's first space station Skylab launches Sky hasar the tower its mission to prove that humans can live for long periods of time in space and to expand our view of distant planets and stars in total nine astr visit the station the longest day is 84 days but Skylab is plagued with mechanical problems and in 1974 it is abandoned by its crew and left to await repair but in 1979 something knocked Skylab out of space scientists discover that between 1974 and 79 the sun fires a barrage of solar flares towards Skylab but it isn't the flares that bring the spacecraft down it's what follows minutes behind each flare is a gigantic wave of radiation the wave contains huge amounts of electromagnetic energy X-rays and gamma rays straight from the surface of the Sun the wave travels at the speed of light and and smashes into the Earth's upper atmosphere which Heats and expands solar storms especially solar flares dump enormous amounts of energy into the upper atmosphere the upper atmosphere responds by heating up from 500° to 1500° and that also causes it to expand out by up to 1,000 miles I think that's an interesting thing this one piece will make 52 layers watch on mobile devices or the big screen all for free no subscription required the swollen atmosphere envelops Skylab the space station is suddenly surrounded by air where once there was nothing but space Air drag slows the satellite down and it begins to fall out of orbit in July 1979 Skylab crashes to Earth luckily much of Skylab burned up on re-entry without regular boosts thousands of satellites could suffer the same fate as Skylab the multi-billion dollar International Space Station is at risk even the International Space Station has to worry about solar storms uh it typically loses about 75 yards of altitude every day and during solar storms it can lose quite a bit more than that but the biggest threat from solar storms isn't to our technology radiation can kill NASA's Neil zap is all to aware of the dangers faced by astronauts on all space missions our major problem is that we don't have control over the situation it's not as easy as turning something off for sending someone home or taking them out of an area it's very difficult for us to get people uh out of Harm's Way once they're once they're in orbit no one knows when the next solar storm will strike and they travel so fast early warning is next to Impossible we confirm ignition and the thrust is go in 1972 NASA has a close call in April Apollo 16 lands on the moon 8 months later Apollo 17 touches down during the the space between these two missions between Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 there was this large event a storm breaks on the surface of the Sun 10 billion tons of radiation Rains Down on the moon unlike the Earth the moon has no atmosphere to protect humans from the effects of radiation if the astronauts had been here when the storm struck they would have absorbed a potentially lethal dose of radiation it wasn't by planning it wasn't intelligent planning that that provided uh for putting the event in the Dead Space it was actually a little bit of luck of the draw at that time but what happens when a massive solar storm is aimed straight at the Earth we can't simply move out of the way for all their power these bursts of radiation are mere ripples spreading into interplanetary space the solar storm that hit Quebec is a tsunami March 13th 1989 across the northern hemisphere Millions witness a dazzling light show called the Aurora Borealis the Northern Lights these Sparks are a visible sign of a clash hundreds of miles above the Earth's surface a war between the Sun and the Earth's invisible defense Shield the magnetosphere Nicola Fox knows the shield like her own backyard the sun gives us everything that we need to be able to survive here on Earth but equally it could take that all away in a split second if we didn't have the magnetosphere to protect us the magnetosphere completely envelops the entire planet this Invisible Shield flows out from the Earth's core it punches through the South Pole cocoons the entire Earth then plunges back down through the North Pole without the magnetosphere all life on Earth would be vulnerable to high energy solar radiation these particles can penetrate living tissue and cause severe damage to cells when the March 13th radiation Cloud collides with the shield most of the charged particles are deflected safely around the earth and back out into space but some radiation does leak in at the poles and that really churns up the whole magnetosphere makes it go to very different configurations than it would normally be in and in order to redress that balance CU nature always has to be balanced the Aurora are [Music] powered these mysterious displays of colored lights form when solar particles slam into gases in the atmosph spere and cause them to Glow the more powerful the storm the more dramatic the auroras this high altitude battle can cause problems for airliners at the poles the atmosphere is especially vulnerable to large bursts of radiation the wave of energy causes havoc in the upper atmosphere disrupting GPS systems and blacking out radio signals during intense storms passenger aircraft have to divert to lower altitudes in order to regain communication with air traffic control on March 9th 1989 as the radiation from the flare arrives at Earth's upper atmosphere the battle with the magnetosphere begins but in Quebec the power stays on 4 days later on March 13th a second wave of radiation hits the Earth's atmosphere and the Aurora puts on an awesome [Music] show as the Northern Lights dance in the sky the lights in Quebec suddenly go out how does a radiation Cloud High in the atmosphere shut down an electricity Network on Earth to find out NASA develops the os7 satellite it can aim a battery of UV and x-ray telescope at the Sun the mission will give scientists their first glimpse of a monster this White Spot might not look impressive but it's the first image ever captured of the most powerful event in our solar system it's called a coronal mass ejection or CME 10 billion tons of material explodes from the atmosphere of the Sun an enorm eruption without Earth's magnetosphere for protection high energy particles from the blast could begin to strip away our atmosphere if a solar flare is the muzzle burst from a gun then the CME is the bullet scientists still don't know exactly why CMEs occur they're formed from the sun's Corona the atmosphere that Surs the Sun and stretches millions of miles out into space temperatures here reach nearly 3 million de Fahrenheit almost 200 times hotter than the surface there are magnetic turbulence and magnetic forces lower down in the Solar atmosphere that cause the literally the the outer atmosphere to be blown out into space CMEs are an electrified tangle of charged particles and magnetic fields a superheated bullet of matter from the Sun a CME looks like a solar flare but it's 100 times more powerful before we knew of CMEs we thought that the Magnetic storms that occurred on Earth were a consequence of this brightening that was seen at the Sun the flare and and as as we've learned more about the sun we've realized that it's the CME that actually causes the magnetic storm roughly half the time a solar flare occurs a CME follows but it travels hundreds of times slower it is a mass of coronal material that's coming off the Sun and that travels with the solar wind that streams continuously away from the Sun at about a million M an hour so it takes about 93 hours for it to get to [Music] Earth on March 9th a solar flare kicks up a wave of radiation from the Sun the wave travels at the speed of light across space it hits the Earth's atmosphere in just 8 minutes the coronal mass ejection arrives 4 days later this is what causes the blackout unlike a solar flare a CME isn't a spray of radiation it's a barrage and all of a sudden this big addition of a thousand 100, times as much energy is thrown at the Earth the CME creates immense electrical currents in the ionosphere the upper atmosphere practically crackles with energy the auroras Light Up the Sky as far south as Texas rivers of charged particles flow through the atmosphere and induce powerful electrical Fields 60 Mi below at the Earth's surface suddenly with no warning a vast current jumps onto the power grid The Surge races through the system and the network overloads the lights go out in Quebec we're talking about thousands of components in a power grid that are affected simultaneously and there really is no place to run and hide from the effects the Quebec event was rare but not unique so how at risk are we and when will the next solar storm strike for solar storms it's always a question of when the next one will happen it's not a question of will they suddenly go away to gauge the future threat scientists need to know how often the Earth has been hit in the past the hottest storms in the solar system have left their Mark in one of the coldest places on Earth the Arctic Circle locked within layers of ice is a history of the Earth the ice keeps a record of solar storms dating back thousands of years to see how often the storms hit researchers look for a chemical they leave behind nitrate you can actually core the ice and measure the nitrate abundances and you find that the spikes in the abundances Matched up very nicely with some of the more recent intense storms by scanning ice cores scientists travel back to an age when a massive solar storm struck Earth a huge peak in nitrate reveals a solar storm that makes the Quebec event look like a firecracker the most intense abundance change that we see in the ice core data occurred in September 1859 uh it was so intense that we call it a superstorm event it knocked out Telegraph service in North America and most of Europe uh and it was also uh seen all the way down in in Kolkata India at the time it was a major world worldwide event seen just about everywhere the 1859 storm is the most powerful solar eruption to hit Earth in 500 years it's three times stronger than the storm that blacked out Quebec if it had hit today it would probably be catastrophic when you think of all of the services that rely on electric power it's rather staggering to imagine the kind of a GE graphic footprint that one of these storms would have after a superstorm the lights don't come back on the next day most of the the Transformers that are used by the big Power grids are custom order and can take months to replace imagine months without power Transportation grinds to a halt the economy nose Dives no running water no sanitation scarce food rampant disease from the space age to the Stone Age In the blink of an eye a solar storm would affect the power grid in an entire continent because these kinds of storms span the entire planet it's unlikely that in your lifetime or mine we're going to see one of these superstorm events um after all the core data was 500 years long and there was only one of these events in 1859 but there are plenty of events that were half as strong or even a third of strong uh they are more numerous and because of that uh the Long Haul effect of these things uh could be actually substantially worse than one major storm all at once it could be worse the sun isn't the only star that produces solar storms astronomers peer far into the depths of space and watch Stars being born and others die a chance discovery shows just how dangerous space can be astrophysicist Eric Felson is researching deep space looking for streams of x-rays but what he stumbles upon blows his mind instead of look finding what we thought we we would find we we instead found these um these rapidly changing x-ray sources associated with young stars and we were quite puzzled frankly for for some years the stars produce mysterious bursts of monstrous x-rays solar flares out of this world so the strongest flares we've seen are 10,000 times stronger in the X-ray band than the strongest flare ever seen on the sun when we looked at a thousand young Suns simultaneously in the arah nebula we found that they're typically flaring at this level once or twice a week solar storms like the one that hit Quebec can release as much energy as a billion atomic bombs the Stars Felson studies produce flares 10,000 times more powerful the Hubble telescope catches an eruption on a star 450 light years from Earth this flare is so huge if it hit a space Colony it would take out more than their power it would take out their Planet scientists call it a super flare it's not just one star that creates super flares there are regions of space where nearly all the stars are are doing it500 light years away is the Orion Nebula it's a brilliant Haze of gas and dust in x-ray the dust disappears leaving only the [Music] Stars this x-ray movie was filmed over 13 days each tiny flash is a flare thousands of times more powerful than any produced by our sun these stars are just like the sun except much younger this cluster was formed about a million years ago now that may sound like a long time ago but compared to the sun which is 4 and a half billion years old it is are very very young Stars the Orion Nebula is where where new Stars Are Born they'll all become like our son they're just like our son was when it was a young star space scientist gibor basri wants to know why young Stars create such huge flares if you take a given kind of star that say a star like the sun there's a direct correlation between how much magnetic activity you see on that star and how fast you spin it slower the star spins the less activity it has on like the sun these Stars create huge amounts of magnetic energy because their equator spins faster than their poles the faster a star spins the bigger the arcs and the stronger the flares and young Stars spin very fast our sun goes around about once a month uh when it was very young it went around every couple of days or or a few days uh so that's how much it's slowed down and that means that the sun is now much less active than it was then Felson describes a sun we wouldn't recognize when the sun was a baby star at a million years old it was three times bigger it was a ruddy orange color it had huge star spots that whipped around every few days rotating much faster than it is today and the magnetic fields which you wouldn't see with your visible eyes but you'd see with an x-ray telescope the magnetic fields would be 10 times the size of the star crackling and seething with explosions some scientists think if it wasn't for the violent early Sun the Earth and all the planets in the solar system might not be here 4.6 billion years ago the solar system is just a cloud of gas and dust racing around the young Sun how it transforms into the solar system we see today is still a mystery so the disc is full of dust and it's like it's it's sort of the consistency of cigarette smoke these are really tiny dust particles we're really pretty puzzled about how you get from dust bunnies to asteroids it's easy to stick snowballs together but it's not so easy to stick sand balls together bass thinks the violent young son help helps build all the planets in our solar system giant solar storms rip through the dis the dust particles are forced together over time they fuse and grow the first embryonic planets are born eventually the solar system is formed and as the sun ages it begins to slow down if it hadn't calmed life in the solar system might never have developed yet when the sun coughs the Earth still shutters there's Little Shelter From the effects of a massive solar storm the only way to protect our electricity network is to shut it down before the storm strikes but how do you predict a solar tantrum solar storms are a serious threat to our high-tech lives in the 21st century the race is on to predict when and where the next one will strike in September 2006 Japan launches the heno satellite its three-year mission is to map the sun's complex magnetic fields the information it sends back could prove key to forecasting solar storms hod orbits 370 Mi above Earth its camera PE straight into the sun's atmosphere it Returns the clearest pictures ever of the sun's surface in December 2006 hodi captures this groundbreaking footage a magnetic Arc snaps and a huge flare erupts it blasts into the solar system at more than a million miles an hour Carol shrier uses data from hinoi to generate the first computer model of a solar storm before it erupts a detailed map of the sun's complex magnetic fields what drives these large solar flares is the magnetic field and specifically its electrical currents running through the magnetic field so each one of these strands is essentially an electrical current prefabricated in the interior of the sun breaking through the surface and becoming visible and then ready to power a flare where the magnetic fields intertwine the closest the currents are strongest Shriver replicates these electrical currents in three dimensions if we tilt this we can suddenly see that these electrical currents come up from one place go up by something like 15 20,000 km above the solar surface and come down again the model shows a Red River of energy equal to a billion atom bombs when the flare erupts it releases that energy in seconds the amount of energy that goes off in this flare is simply astounding um it's the equivalent of a million times a million atomic bombs going off at the same time if hodi can spot these densely packed lines of magnetism before a flare explodes on the sun scientists might be able to predict when the next solar storm will strike until that technology arrives space weather forecasters use a method of analyzing the sun's activity developed almost 400 years ago sunspots sunspots form because the sun's atmosphere is hotter than its surface the magnetic arcs block the atmosphere making the sunspots burn cooler than the surrounding surface 6,300 de versus 10,000 de sunspots come and go in an 11year cycle of maximums and minimums solar minimum has few sunspots and the fewest flares at solar maximum 200 sunspots or more all firing magnetic arcs a week before the Quebec blackout astronomers identify a group of sunspots on the Eastern edge of the sun's surface the blackout occurs during a solar maximum the next maximum is around the corner in 2012 the Sunspot Cycle tells us the gun is loaded it doesn't tell us when or where the bullet will strike once the magnetic arcs cross the trigger is pulled and a flare explodes it reaches Earth in just 8 minutes too fast for a warning but the most damaging part of a solar storm is slower a coronal mass ejection can take up to 4 days to arrive if we know when the solar surge will hit we can save the electricity Network by shutting it down at the space weather prediction center scientists keep a watchful eye on the sun they're looking for any increase in activity including the buildup of sunspots well the forecaster today is looking at the data trying to understand what the sun is doing right now and then making predictions of the effects on Earth Solar satellite technology is Young it's observed the solar maximum only three times space weather forecasting is where Earth weather forecasting was 50 years ago if you were trying to predict a hurricane if you didn't know anything about the speed of the Winds and you didn't know anything about the atmospheric pressure at the eye of the storm and some of those types of things that would be fairly comparable to where we are now in space weather you can see a hurricane coming not a solar storm once it leaves the sun's surface it's practically invisible it can hold 10 billion tons of matter but it spread over millions of square miles just a handful of atoms in every cubic foot you couldn't see one of these storms arriving at Earth with the the naked eye uh they are so dilute that they are actually better than the kinds of vacuums that we can create under laboratory conditions satellite instruments are sensitive enough to detect solar storms but there's a catch if one heads straight toward us it's very difficult to tell how fast it's traveling it's like the batter in a baseball game as the ball hurdles toward the hitter it's impossible to judge its exact speed three strikes and he's out if scientists misjudge the speed of a Solar storm one strike could take us back to the Dark Ages to help solve this blind spot in 2006 NASA launches a two-stage satellite called stereo stereo is great we're going to be able to watch chronal Mass injections uh from perspectives that we've never been able to see before and most importantly it would be the the one that allows us to watch the event happen along the sun earth line after launch the satellites separate they use the moon's gravity to reach their orbits flanking the Earth the two near identical satellites orbit the Sun but one of them is slightly ahead of the other they give the first three-dimensional stereo view of the sun scientists can now forecast very quickly if and when a solar storm is going to hit the planet it will improve our the timing in particular of the forecast that we would try to make um you know to mitigate the the consequences of that as it went by the Earth NASA hopes that stereo's information will lengthen early warning times from just a few hours to a couple of days it could prevent blackouts like Quebec from ever happening again again one day advanced satellite technology might even predict solar storms before they're born it won't be next year um it may be a few years but it's doable now we've been moving ahead very rapidly with less and less simplifications with bigger and bigger resolution more finesse in the models and we're getting to a state that we can say that we're actually approximating what really happens on the sun stereo could save our way of life from solar storms for 2 million years solar storms did us no harm less than two centuries ago we harnessed electricity and got our fingers burned nobody knows exactly when the next solar storm will strike solar maximum is just 3 years away and once again Earth could be in the firing line hopefully this time the lights will stay [Music] on [Music]

Channel: Spark

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Keywords: Spark, celestial bodies, earth, engineering, solar activity, solar astronomy, solar cycle, solar flare science, solar flares, solar physics, solar research, solar science, solar storm facts, solar storm history, solar storm impact, solar storm news, solar storm tracking, solar telescope, solar wind, space weather, sun explosions

Id: sMjZoa_nxdk

Length: 45min 59sec (2759 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2024