“A great fire appeared in the sky in the north and lasted three nights,” wrote a Portuguese scribe in early March 1582. All over the world in feudal Japan observers in Kyoto noticed the same fiery red image in the sky. Similar reports of strange night lights were recorded in Leipzig. Yecheon, South Korea; and a dozen other cities in Europe and East Asia.
It was a breathtaking event. While people at high latitudes knew the aurors well in 1582, most people closer to the equator weren’t. The solar storm that year was unlike anything vividly remembered, and it was so powerful that it brought the aurora to latitudes as low as 28 degrees (consistent with Florida, Egypt, and southern Japan). People near the equator had no frame of reference for such dazzling nocturnal depictions, and many took it as a religious symbol.
“This whole part of heaven seemed to be burning in fiery flames; It seemed like the sky was on fire, ”wrote Pero Ruiz Soares, an eyewitness in Lisbon and author of a Portuguese chronicle from the 16th century. “Nobody remembered seeing anything like this… At midnight, great jets of fire rose over the castle, which were terrible and terrifying. The next day it happened at the same hour, but it wasn’t that great and terrifying. Everyone went to the country to see this great sign. “
An aurora caused by a coronal mass ejection in 2010 as seen from the International Space Station. Photo credit: NASA, ISS Expedition 23 crew.
These centuries-old reports of the 1582 solar storm were recently uncovered by researchers hoping to learn more about the event. Just as early modern peoples sought meaning in the Aurors, so too are modern scientists striving to understand the fiery skies of 1582. This massive solar storm and other storms like this one are important indicators of historical solar weather patterns. Understanding them will help you predict future solar activity.
The historical record seems to suggest that major storms like the one in 1582 occur at least once a century, and so we should expect one or more of them to hit Earth in the 21st century.
While premodern solar storms had little impact outside of their incredible aurors, a large solar storm today could wreak billions of dollars in damage and shut down power grids around the world. For example, a moderately large storm in 1989 completely shut down the electricity grid in Quebec, and a larger storm could worsen. The worst solar storm in recorded history, the Carrington event of 1859, would be far more damaging, although it only affected early telegraph lines at the time.
Solar storms are caused by disturbances in the solar atmosphere. High-energy explosions known as solar flares can be accompanied by a huge gust of solar wind known as a coronal mass ejection. These fast-moving solar particles interact with the Earth’s magnetosphere, creating living aurors and disrupting electronics.
The ‘Seahorse Flare’, which caused a solar storm in August 1972. Photo credit: NASA, Big Bear Solar Observatory.
Solar storms can also bring deadly doses of radiation. Earth’s protective magnetosphere protects us from its effects, but as NASA and its partners seek to return to the moon and beyond in the decades to come, an accurate model of solar weather will be vital to mission planning. This lesson was learned during the Apollo era when a solar storm blew up the earth in August 1972. The storm would have been fatal to astronauts if they had been on the moon at that time. Fortunately, Apollo 16 had returned to Earth in April of that year, and Apollo 17 didn’t launch until December, so a disaster was avoided. Careful planning and a little luck are required to protect future lunar astronauts.
Should we be concerned about future solar storms? Maybe. At the very least, like any other natural disaster, we should be prepared for it. Since the 1989 power outage, the power generation industry has begun working on mitigation techniques and taking preventative measures to make power grids more resilient to solar weather. However, it is difficult to be fully prepared. When the next big solar storm comes, and one day it does, we may not be fully prepared for it. But one thing is certain: it will be a hell of a show.
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Feature Image: Artist’s impression of the Earth’s magnetosphere. Photo credit: NASA
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