Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
In the year 2003, with Halloween approaching, a truly scary chain of events overtook our
solar system.
93 million miles away, the sun began to vent its rage.
On its surface, dark regions, called sunspots, appeared unexpectedly, a sign of rising tension
within.
It had been three and a half years since the sun last erupted in fury at the peak of an
11-year cycle of solar flare-ups.
Back then, we got ready for it by shutting down satellites that were vulnerable to high
levels of radiation.
No one expected this.
The sun erupted in a series of massive explosions, called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs.
Vast electrified gas clouds raced outward.
Solar telescopes recorded the action: the largest emission of solar x-rays ever seen;
flares reaching tens of thousands of miles into space; and a wave of charged particles
traveling at 8 million kilometers per hour.
The sun became a giant plasma weapon, more potent than any in science fiction, and pointed
right at our home planet.
On Earth... the Halloween storms produced some of the most spectacular auroras ever
seen at the north and south poles.
They occur when a wave of charged particles from the Sun interacts with Earth's magnetic
field in the outer regions of the atmosphere.
Beautiful and awe inspiring, they were once identified as the dancing of spirits, or as
signs from God.
But as lovely a light show as this is, it means there are kilovolts of electricity in
the air, looking for places to get down to the Earth.
The Halloween solar storms brought jolts of electricity that impacted power grids around
the world.
In space, they damaged 28 communications satellites, and destroyed two. A newly installed GPS-based
air navigation system went down for 30 hours.
This energetic surge did not stop there.
Sweeping past Mars, it was so strong that it burned out the radiation monitor aboard
the spacecraft, Mars Global Surveyor. Ironically, this instrument was designed to study radiation
that human explorers might encounter on future missions beyond Earth.
Months later, the same rush of solar energy washed over the two Voyager spacecraft, on
their way to the far reaches of the solar system.
Coronal Mass Ejections like this have been known to blast their way out to where the
solar wind meets the flow of particles around the galaxy itself.