on July 23rd 2024 Europe's solar Orbiter spacecraft observed a super powerful solar flare erupting From The Far Side of the Sun this flare wasn't the most extreme ever recorded but still we got extremely lucky this time not to get fried by it such solar flares often cause longlived raging radiation storms and if such a storm moves in the direction of Earth it can lead to worldwide blackouts [Applause] before we go deeper into details of that potentially disastrous solar flare we need to figure out what exactly this solar phenomenon is solar flares occur because the magnetic
fields in the atmosphere of our star are moving non-stop when the sun is approaching its solar maximum and that's the most active period of its 11 yearlong cycle which is by the way exactly what's happening now its magnetic fields get more and more Tangled making our star look like an enormous bom of Tangled rubber bands they loop around cross over one another cut one another off and then reconnect ever seen iron filings sprinkled on a bar magnet these filings line up along the magnetic lines of force like that the hot Plasma on the surface of
the Sun is at the mercy of the magnetic lines of force sometimes when the magnetic fields interact with each other some plasma gets disconnected from the fields and its particles accelerate to immense speeds and send powerful radiation to space that's what a solar flare is other times our star throws off massive amounts of matter those events are coronal mass ejections CMEs just one CME can contain as much as 20 billion tons of material if that material were rock it would create a mountain about 2.75 M across and almost a half a mile tall the ejected
material often travels at a speed of over a million mph solar flares and CMEs are the most powerful explosions in the solar system releasing unimaginable amounts of energy solar flares have their own classification according to their strength the smallest and weaken ones are a and bclass then there are C and mclass solar flares and the strongest are x-class flares a number from 1 to 9 and in some cases a larger one accompanies each letter that's similar to the RoR scale for earthquakes A and B Class flares are too weak to affect our planet as for
C-Class flares they may have small noticeable consequences mclass flares can cause short radio blackouts at the poles and weak radiation storms that can still harm astronauts but the most dangerous of them all are x-class flares these are flares more than 10 times more powerful than X1 that's why the classification of x-class flares can go higher than nine now let's get back to that recent solar flare it was x14 class one now we already know that it means it was an extra strong flare other large flares astronomers have detected recently include an X12 solar flare that
happened on the 20th of May and an X10 flare that occurred on the 17th of July all of them have come from the backside of the sun if we talk of the earth side of our star the largest solar flare that has been recorded so far within this solar cycle happened on the 14th of May it was an x87 flare that led to radio blackouts and a strong geomagnetic storm leading to magnificent auroras all over the world occurred a few days earlier powerful coronal mass ejections accompanied this storm as for the July X glass flare
it was so powerful that it could have ended up tragically for us luckily all that magnetically charged Plasma Blast that accompanied the flare didn't travel in our direction if it had it would have been quite the solar storm auroras would have been incredibly impressive and a wee bit terrifying in their magnificence but at the same time such a dynamic blast of energetic particles hurdling our way could have caused major technological problems and electrical blackouts like the event in 1989 which severely harmed Quebec's power grid or a much much earlier catastrophe that still managed to to
cause a lot of harm to the world I'm talking about the Carrington event which occurred in 1859 and was the first documented solar flare affecting our planet it happened on the 1st of September and was named after Richard Carrington the solar astronomer who witnessed the flare through his own telescope and sketched the sun's sunspots according to scientists that flare was the most powerful documented solar storm over the last 500 years the Carrington event triggered auroras that were visible as far south as the Caribbean it led to severe interruptions in Telegraph Services all over the world
even shocking some Telegraph operators and sparking fires after discharges from the line's ignited Telegraph paper another major solar flare that erupted on the 4th of August 1972 destroyed long-distance phone communication across a few States including Illinois this event even made the American Telephone and Telegraph company redes designed its power system for transatlantic cables now let's move to March 1985 when two super powerful CMEs triggered a geomagnetic storm which in turn set off a power blackout in Canada on the 13th of March this blackout left around 6 million people without electricity for 9 hours it is
said that the flare disrupted electric power transmission from the hydro Quebec generation station and melted a few power Transformers in New Jersey and still this solar flare was nowhere near the power of the Carrington event the bastile day solar storm took its name from the French national holiday because it occurred on the same day on the 14th of July in the year 2000 it was an X5 class event that caused some satellites to short circuit and resulted in radio blackouts it's still one of the most highly observed solar storm events from October to November 2003
our star Unleashed a series of large solar flares and coronal mass ejections and they did reach Earth and slam into our atmosphere those solar storms also known as Halloween storms of 2003 caused aircraft to be rerouted impacted satellite systems and led to power outages in Sweden besides the solar and heliospheric Observatory couldn't fulfill its functions during this solar Onslaught on the 28th of October 2003 the Sun sent a Whopper of a solar flare our way the fire was so powerful it overwhelmed the spacecraft sensor that was measuring it the sensor topped out at a whopping
x28 but later scientists figure out that the Flur had reached a peak strength of about x45 one more thing that made the Halloween storms so scary was that they happened during a time in the solar cycle when solar activity is usually quiet that's 2 to 3 years after the solar maximum a according to NASA's statistics just 17 powerful flares erupted from our Star during that time the sun spewed out another x-class solar flare on the 5th of December 2006 it was an X9 class flare that disrupted satellite to ground Communications and GPS navigational signals for
around 10 minutes that solar storm was so powerful it even damaged the solar xray imager instrument on the Go's 13 satellite it aaine damage to several pixels of its detector in February 2022 SpaceX experienced the terrifying power of our star when a devastating geomagnetic storm destroyed 38 Starling satellites worth tens of millions of dollars it happened shortly after they were deployed unfortunately Starling satellites are especially vulnerable to geomagnetic storms since they're released into extremely low altitude orbits between 60 and 120 M they also rely on their onboard engines to over come the drag force and
raise themselves to their final altitude of around 350 Mi over the surface of our planet the thing is during a geomagnetic storm Earth's atmosphere absorbs energy from the storm heats up and extends upwards it results in a denser thermosphere which means more drag and it can be a serious issue for satellites that's exactly what happened the batch of newly relased Starling satellites didn't manage to overcome the increased drag and started to fall back eventually burning up in the atmosphere that's it for today so hey if you pacified your curiosity then give the video a like
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