Scientist collects award for work on solar storms
Print Edition
A researcher at the State Key Laboratory of Space Weather of the National Space Science Center under the Chinese Academy of Sciences has made an outstanding contribution to research on solar storms, and was recently awarded the Zhao Jiuzhang Science Prize, named after China’s space science pioneer.
Delivering a report at the award presentation, scientist Liu Ying said a super solar storm could cause trillions of dollars worth of damage, from which it could take between four and 10 years to recover.
A super solar storm on September 1, 1859 first triggered research on the phenomenon.
The Carrington Event, as it was known, caused colorful auroras that could be seen even in low latitude regions like Hawaii. It also caused the failure of telegraph systems in northern America and Europe.
The most recent solar storm happened on March 15 this year. Although not a super storm, it caused the biggest geomagnetic storm on earth in a decade.
“Our research shows that the geomagnetic storm was caused by the interaction of two coronal mass ejections,” Liu said.
Understanding solar storms is important to China’s space development. The high-energy particle radiation of a solar storm could be carcinogenic for astronauts and damage electronic devices on a spacecraft, he said.
If the solar storm hit earth’s magnetosphere, it could trigger a geomagnetic storm and damage power grids, and navigation and telecommunication systems, he said.
In 2012, Japanese, European and Chinese scientists respectively found a remarkable increase of radioactive carbon-14 in tree rings and corals, which dated back more than 1,200 years to about AD775.
Scientists believe the phenomenon was caused by a super solar storm, after finding a record of splendid auroras on the night of January 17 in historical documents from China’s Tang Dynasty (618-907).
According to the documents, the auroras covered most of the sky above the northern hemisphere, and lasted for about eight hours.
Another super solar storm, on July 23, 2012, was regarded as “perfect” by scientists.
Perfect conditions
“We call it a ‘perfect storm,’ because all the conditions aligned to create such a big storm,” Liu said.
He cooperated with scientists in the United States and Europe to observe the whole process of a super solar storm for the first time in history, and to identify the formation mechanism. Their research was published on the scientific journal, Nature Communications.
“Had the solar storm happened nine days earlier, it would have hit the earth, destroying power grids, satellites and GPS systems, causing huge losses,” Liu said.
US scientists have estimated the probability of a super solar storm happening in the coming decade at about 12 percent, while Japanese scientists have put the figure at 6 percent.
“We believe the probability could be from 5 percent to 10 percent, but it’s only a rough estimate,” Liu said.
The formation of solar storms is attributed to the unstable process of the corona magnetic field, but as this is still difficult to observe the actual cause remains a mystery.
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