On September 1, 1859, the Sun spewed electrified gas and subatomic particles amounting to the energy of 10 billion atomic bombs towards Earth. Fortunately, the world back then was not like today.
About the only problem this event caused was for telegraph communications to fail. It literally shocked operators and caused systems to catch fire.
Northern Lights were reported as far south as Cuba and Hawaii. They allowed witnesses to read newspapers by the light of the auroras alone.
Richard Carrington, a notable British astronomer, immediately reported the flash to the Royal Astronomical Society. He probably didn’t give it much more thought until the next day. By then, the fast-moving solar particles had had time to travel across space to Earth. This caused the geomagnetic field to go haywire.
The blast of solar particles wrapped Earth in a seething, writhing mass of high-energy particles. It buffeted, squeezed, and distorted Earth’s magnetosphere. This event released an estimated 1035 electron volts of energy. That’s a ten followed by 35 zeroes.
This amount of energy is equal to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb. It’s also equal to the amount of energy the sun releases in about 10 seconds.
It was the most powerful solar event ever yet recorded.
News reports from the time
The Carrington Event was a hot story in newspapers of the day. The September 2, 1859, edition of The New York Times reported:
Last night the city was visited by one of the most brilliant displays of the aurora borealis that has been witnessed for many years. The sky was clear, and the stars shone with unusual brilliancy. About nine o’clock a faint light appeared in the north, which gradually increased in brightness until it reached the zenith. The aurora then assumed a variety of forms, and the sky was constantly changing. At times the whole heavens were illuminated with a brilliant light, and the stars were entirely obscured. The aurora continued for several hours and disappeared about midnight.
On September 3, 1859, The Boston Globe reported:
Yesterday there was a great magnetic storm which affected all the telegraph lines in the country. The telegraph lines in Boston were all interrupted for several hours, and some of them were so badly injured that they will not be repaired for several days. The storm also affected the magnetic compasses on ships, and some vessels lost their way.
And on September 5, 1859, The London Times reported:
On the night of the 1st and 2nd of September … the magnetic compasses were so much affected that it was impossible to steer by them. The aurora borealis was seen in many places where it is rarely seen, and in some places it was so bright that it was possible to read by it.
Back then, it was basically only telegraphs that used electricity on Earth.
What would it be like today?
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If a sun flare of that magnitude happened today, anyone addicted to screens would lose it. The failure of electronics would create a global mess.
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