How to escape the sun catastrophe?
In real life, news of asteroids passing by with Earth often makes headlines, but few people care about the potential threat of the sun to Earth. A few years ago NASA announced that a superstorm two years earlier had nearly hit Earth, "powerful enough to beat modern civilization back to the eighteenth century," thus unveiling the tyrannical side of the sun.
The solar storm took place five years ago on July 23, 2012
It is the most powerful in the past one hundred and fifty years. If it had skimmed the Earth, we might still be picking up the pieces right now. As long as this solar storm occurs a week earlier, the Earth may have been hit. Fortunately, that solar storm only passed through Earth's orbit and hit a U.S. solar observation satellite.
Scientists say that if a solar storm hits Earth, it will first cause a widespread blackout
Not only will household appliances not be available, communication will be disrupted, and even toilets in homes will not be able to flush water, as the city's water supply system also relies on electricity.
Scientists also say the 2012 solar storm was at least as powerful as the superstorm of 1859. The solar storm that occurred in 1859 was the strongest solar storm recorded before the twenty-first century, also known as the "Carrington Event".
Research from the National Academy of Sciences has shown that solar storms similar to the Carrington Event could have caused more than two trillion dollars in economic damage to the planet if they had occurred today, twenty times more severe than Hurricane Katrina.
How likely is it that a solar storm will hit Earth? Earlier this year, American scientist Pete Reilly published a paper analyzing solar storms over the past five decades and concluded that solar storms similar to the Carrington event would hit Earth 12 percent in the next decade.
Not a calm surface
When we look at the sun, we are often pierced by the sharp light of the sun, as if there is no difference between the surface of the sun. In fact, this seemingly calm surface is not calm at all, but like a pot of boiling water churning violently.
A picture of light and dark spots covering the sun's photosphere, known as rice grain tissue, each about 1,000 kilometers in size. When you look at it, these spots don't stop moving, but the shape of the pattern remains the same. The temperature of the photosphere is about 5500 ° C, and the solar radiation energy received on Earth basically comes from this layer.
Beyond the photosphere are the chromosphere and the coronal layer, the true solar atmosphere.
The thickness of the chromosphere is about 2000 kilometers, and inside it, the temperature increases with the height, and the temperature of the top layer can reach tens of thousands of degrees. This layer is a plasma filled with a magnetic field. Due to the instability of the magnetic field, violent flares often erupt inside this layer, while also emitting a large amount of radiation. The solar activity and its impact on helioternal space that people are concerned about depends mainly on the characteristics of this layer. Solar storms, on the other hand, occur in the chromosphere and then outwards in the corona layer. This is the outermost layer of the Solar Atmosphere, up to millions of kilometers thick and at temperatures of about 1 million degrees.
The Sun is a relatively quiet ball of hot gas, but the Solar Atmosphere is constantly active, which results in a complex series of perturbation processes in the Solar Atmosphere, which are sometimes unusually intense in local areas. This perturbation phenomenon is what people often call solar activity. At present, the solar activity phenomena that people understand mainly include sunspots, light spots, spectroscopic spots, prominence, flares and changes in the state of the corona.
Sunspots and solar cycles
Among the many activities of the Sun, the easiest to observe are sunspots. Sunspots are dark spots that often haunt the photosphere and are the basic signs of solar activity. On the surface of the sun, sunspots are like an irregular hole, the temperature is about 3000 ° C ~ 4500 ° C, which is lower than the surrounding temperature, so it looks dark, but this is only the result of the contrast of the bright bulb.
At the height of sunspots, it means that the solar activity is particularly intense, and astronomy refers to this year as the peak year of solar activity. Although solar activity is very intense, it still has a periodic law. In 1843, after observing and counting the average number of sunspot changes over seventeen years, the German amateur astronomer Schwab found that the rise and fall of sunspots had a cycle of about ten years. Sunspot activity cycles are currently considered to be eleven years. Internationally, the eleven-year cycle, which began with the lowest number of sunspots in 1755, was No. 1, and in 2008, sunspot activity began to enter the eleven-year cycle of No. 24.
Sunspots are regions with strong magnetic fields, and the convection of material inside the Sun is inhibited by the strong magnetic field of sunspots, reducing the amount of energy transmitted from the Sun's interior to the Sun's surface. Magnetic fields cause large amounts of heat to enter the corona, causing violent solar flares and coronal mass ejections.
Because the sun's luminosity is directly related to magnetic field activity, the solar cycle has a great impact not only on space weather, but also on Earth's climate. Solar minimum periods are often associated with Earth's low-temperature climate, while periods exceeding the average length are associated with high-temperature climates. In the seventeenth century, the solar cycle seemed to have stopped completely for decades, during which only a few sunspots were observed. In this era, known as the Monde Miniatural or Xiaoice Period, Europe experienced very low temperatures.
When solar activity reaches its peak, the Earth's temperature rises significantly, and there is no definite answer to its specific mechanism. Some scientists believe that the intensity of solar activity affects the number of cosmic rays reaching The Earth, resulting in changes in cloud levels at high and low altitudes, which in turn affects the reflection of clouds on sunlight and infrared rays on the ground, causing temperatures to rise or fall. In the valley year of solar activity, solar radiation is weaker than in peak years, and the temperature of the Earth is relatively lower. In the peak year of solar activity, the Earth's temperature has increased significantly. In 1995, solar activity was stronger than in previous years, and the summer heat in Asia, Africa and Latin America was unbearable.
In China, there is often a situation of drought in the south and the north near the solar activity valley year, resulting in the impact of agricultural production. During the Republic of China period, meteorologist Zhu Kezhen found that the historical Jianghuai flood was closely related to solar activity, and inferred that in 1998 and 2020, solar activity was just in the valley period, and jianghuai would have heavy water. Sure enough, in 1998, there was a huge flood in the Yangtze River Basin. Although there are reasons for the destruction of forest vegetation in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, the impact of solar activity on atmospheric circulation cannot be underestimated.
Flares erupt
Of all solar activity, the most intense and most influential on earth is the flare. It's powerful and powerful. A large flare generally takes ten to twenty minutes from birth to disappearance, but the energy it releases is equivalent to the power of a billion million-ton hydrogen bomb explosion. Huge energy release can cause a variety of electromagnetic radiation and particle radiation in the local area suddenly enhanced, in addition to visible light, there are ultraviolet, infrared, X-ray, γ rays, high-energy particles and cosmic rays. These dizzying variety of radiation poured out in a short period of time and traveled through helioternal space to Earth, causing anomalous geophysical phenomena. Strong short-wave radiation will destroy the structure of the Earth's atmospheric ionosphere, increase the ionization of the ionosphere, and strengthen the absorption of radio waves, thereby affecting radio communications on the ground and even causing all telecommunications to be interrupted. This is a serious threat to industries that rely on telecommunications. When streams of high-energy particles (up to hundreds or nearly a thousand kilometers per second) reach the vicinity of the Earth, they disrupt the Earth's magnetic field, causing the magnetic needles to vibrate violently, like the Earth's magnetic field suddenly rolling up a storm. At this point, the magnetic compass loses its effect. Some high-energy particles are forced by the Earth's magnetic field to land in large numbers along the magnetic field line to the north and south magnetic poles of the earth, colliding with atoms and molecules in the upper atmosphere, and stimulating brilliant and colorful auroras. These ionized particles can damage Earth's power grid, damage or even destroy electronics on satellites, and cause great harm to astronauts who perform spacewalks.
Testimony of history
One evening in 34 B.C., Julius Caesar spotted a dazzling light on the horizon, believing it to be a signal of fire for an attack, and ordered his Roman soldiers to rush into the coastal city of Ostia. In fact, this light is the aurora caused by solar activity.
In the early days, the effects of solar activity on human beings were not fully understood. It was only in the mid-nineteenth century that solar storms truly showed their destructive power against human civilization.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Americans began to use the telegraph. Some telegraphers were electrocuted while clicking on the button, which attracted people's attention - the Earth's magnetic field, which had been disturbed by solar storms, charged the telegraph machine with a powerful current.
In the twentieth century, the invention of radio, airplanes, and radar made human activities increasingly vulnerable to solar eruptions. In the 1940s, British anti-air raid radars were flooded with radio signals. The British originally thought that The Scientists of Nazi Germany had developed a new type of radar jamming equipment, and prepared to carry out a large-scale air strike, and the whole army was on emergency alert, and it was later found that this was a false alarm caused by the outbreak of solar activity. In February 1958, a strong spike in solar activity catastrophically paralyzed the transatlantic ocean floor telephone cable.
The relatively mild solar climate of the 1960s and 1970s allowed humanity to let its guard down. At that time, with the rapid progress of science and technology, human beings continued to launch orbiters and communication satellites, and became increasingly intoxicated and dependent on radio and television. It was not until the 1980s, due to the intensification of the influence of the solar cycle, that human beings re-tasted the suffering of solar storms. In 1984, during U.S. President Reagan's visit to China, the communications of the Air Force No. 1 plane he was on were severely disrupted by solar storms for several hours. During the peak solar activity in 1989, solar storms hit quebec's power grid in Quebec, Canada, and within ninety seconds, more than 10,000 transformers were burned, causing Quebec power to be interrupted for nine hours, six million residents to suffer from power outages, and more than a few days in some areas.
The sun's intense activity can have a devastating effect on spacecraft. High-temperature plasma and high-energy electrons generated by the sun's intense activity can cause the metal surface of the spacecraft to charge; The high-energy particles produced can trigger catastrophic consequences for space systems and cause serious radiation damage to spacecraft and astronauts; Solar activity will cause geomagnetic disturbances, affecting the normal flight of spacecraft; Solar activity also affects the upper atmosphere, which in turn causes decay in the spacecraft's orbit.
To date, several artificial satellites have failed during the solar "disturbance". In 1987, still at the peak of sunspots, the satellites of the NOAA Center in the United States were irreparably damaged by a solar storm. In the 1989 solar magnetic storm, short-wave communications in the Western Hemisphere were greatly attenuated and interrupted sixty times, two of which were as long as twelve hours, causing meteorological satellites to interrupt cloud map transmission and military tracking targets to disappear, causing huge economic losses. In the autumn of 2003, many Japanese satellites suffered one after another under the interference of solar storms: the "Echo" data relay satellite had a signal anomaly, the "Green 2" Earth observation satellite's solar panel power generation capacity was basically lost, and the "Kodama" communication satellite also experienced a brief signal interruption.
Affect life on Earth
In daily life, we often hear some pigeon trainers complain that they have lost a lot of pigeons in recent years; Others wake up one night to find birds that have not nested here. Experts have analyzed that the reason for this is that the sunspot explosion caused the Earth's magnetic field to change, which caused birds that use the magnetic field as a navigation to lose their way. Some experts believe that the extinction of rare animals endemic to some regions also corresponds to the sunspot outbreak.
The impact of human health on the sun should not be underestimated. The Institute of Biophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences has found through experimental research that the increase in the intensity of sunspot activity is related to the decline in immunity of living organisms in time. In the years of sunspot outbreaks, the body's resistance to disease is weakened, and infectious diseases are prone to large-scale outbreaks. Medical workers have also found that influenza viruses also have an eleven-year flow cycle, from 1173 to 1978, a total of ninety-six global influenza outbreaks, more than half of which are in the peak sunspot year, and the rest also occurs in the two years before and after the peak of sunspots. The reason is that sunspot outbreaks make a large number of particle and ray streams pass through the Earth's atmosphere, and the virus genes floating in the Earth's atmosphere with very simple structures are easily broken and recombined, which greatly increases the chances of virus mutations to form a new class of more deadly viruses. Influenza viruses, in particular, mutate faster than the renewal rate of the human immune system.
This is just one aspect of the impact of solar activity on life. When the solar activity is intense, ultraviolet rays, radio waves, high-energy charged particle streams and short-wave radiation on the earth's radiation is significantly enhanced, such radiation can quickly lead to people suffering from cataracts and malignant skin tumors, significantly destroying the human immune system, inducing various diseases. Excessive short-wave radiation can even cause immediate death; When solar activity erupts, the sudden increase in cardiovascular disease increases, and the condition of heart patients worsens and even endangers lives.
In addition, during the peak period of solar activity, people's biological cycles, including emotions, psychology, and thinking activities, will also produce great fluctuations. When the solar activity is strong, people's memory and judgment are significantly reduced, and their ability to deal with and analyze problems is also significantly reduced. This may be the reason for the increase in traffic accidents and plane crashes when the sun is active. Even some jurists have found that social crime rates rose during sunspot outbreaks.
The most violent solar storm
At the end of October 2003, solar storms from successive sunspot eruptions struck the Earth. This rare sunspot eruption is an astronomical spectacle.
According to the 11-year solar cycle, solar activity will fall back after reaching its peak, and in the eleven-year cycle of The 23rd, the peak of the solar cycle is around 2000, after which it should enter a weakening period. However, this time the sun was unusually erupted, and in October and November 2003, sunspots unusually produced huge solar storms in an unusual succession, which was like a huge tornado during the non-tornado season.
According to the literature, the worst corona eruption occurred in April 2000, but the gas and dust from that solar magnetic storm did not hit the Earth directly. During the solar magnetic storm, nearly 10 billion tons of material were thrown to the earth, and the "Kodama" communication satellite was once interrupted because of this solar storm. The geomagnetic storm caused by the storm caused a one-hour power outage in the southern Swedish city of Malmö, affecting about 20,000 homes.
Astronomers confirmed that the November 4, 2003, solar eruption was the most intense in astronomical history, and NOAA's GOES satellite X-ray detector, which monitors the sun, was saturated at one point and pointed its hands to its highest value.
The crown ejected from the solar eruption left the sun's surface at a speed of about 2300 kilometers per second, throwing billions of tons of superheated gas into space, and only a small fraction of it rushed to Earth.
The sun was soaring early to know
Because solar activity is closely related to the human living environment, it has important application value to study the laws of solar activity and try to predict them. Solar activity forecasts are divided into long-term, medium-term and short-term forecasts according to the length of the forecast time. Long-term forecasts are generally forecasts of one year or more, such as forecasting the evolution of sunspot cycles. Medium-term forecasts are mainly forecasts made days or months in advance to predict whether there will be large active areas on the surface of the sun during this time. Short-term forecasting is a forecast of 1 to 3 days in advance, mainly to predict flares and ionospheric disturbances caused by flares. Currently, short-term forecasts are the most successful forecasts of solar activity.
Solar activity forecasting requires complete solar and geophysical data, but the sun can only be seen during the day anywhere on Earth, so this requires international cooperation. The organization of the cooperation is mainly the responsibility of the International Radio Science Association and the International Astronomical Union, which coordinates the observation of the Sun by countries twenty-four hours a day.
In general, there is no perfect and effective method for solar activity forecasting. Data sources, forecasting techniques and forecasting content vary widely from forecasting centre to centre. The forecast level is generally not high, only when the solar activity is in a low year, the forecast safety period has a high accuracy, and the accuracy rate can reach 90%; For the occurrence of large flares in large activity areas, the reporting rate is about 40%. The study of solar activity remains one of the scientific conundrums of the twenty-first century.
Compared to Earthlings protected by dense atmospheres and strong buildings, aviation personnel flying at high altitudes and astronauts on missions in space are more vulnerable to solar storms. In addition, passengers on high-latitude near-pole routes are exposed to an increasing number of cosmic rays. Radiation sickness is highly likely to occur when exposed to radiation— usually with fever and vomiting.
A new solar storm detection system based in Antarctica,
Astronauts can be prompted two hours in advance to wear protective clothing to combat massive solar flares and coronal mass ejections. The probe is located at the Amundsen-Scott Expedition station at the South Pole in the United States, and can make predictions 166 minutes before the solar storm strikes by detecting proton energy in the solar wind. These devices predict that the effective range of solar proton peaks is between hundreds of thousands and millions of megagabits of electron volts. Protons with an energy of more than 100 megagabits of electron volts can penetrate any object on their trajectory. This warning time is enough for astronauts to shade themselves in the area of the spacecraft's protective wall, and the high-latitude polar route aircraft can also have enough time to lower their latitude to obtain protection from the Earth's magnetic field.
A better strategy is early warning. Ashley Dale, an engineer at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, and colleagues are working on a project called SolarMAX. Dell plans to place a ring of small satellites around the sun that can measure both the sun's magnetic field and the space environment through which solar storms may pass. This can help us predict when and where large solar storms are likely to occur, and whether they will target Earth. Dell estimates that this could give us a few days of early warning time. During this time, people can divert loads from the grid, cut off vulnerable wires, and redirect satellites... These measures prevent most of the damage that solar storms can bring.
What's next for technology? Maybe it's like the sci-fi film "The Sun Havoc."
as envisioned, the use of bombs to artificially intervene in changes in the sun; Maybe it's like the science fiction novel Full Band Blocking Interference, creating a super solar storm in four or two pounds... The story of the solar catastrophe is far from over.