'The Dark Side of the Sun': 3 Things You Need to Know
Imagine being without electricity for a year. That’s the extreme but not unfathomable situation the Eastern Seaboard of the United States could find itself in if we don’t learn more about the Sun.
The clip above from The Dark Side of the Sun, premiering Feb. 11 at 10 p.m. as part of Science Channel Weekend on Discovery, explains how and why the chaos would unfold if a solar storm the magnitude of 1859’s Carrington Event were to hit Earth in just the right way today and we weren’t prepared.
To help us break it down into three things you should know — including how the world’s largest solar telescope and first spacecraft sent to the Sun may help provide much needed answers — Yahoo TV spoke with Dr. Matt Mountain, President of Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA); Dr. Valentín Martínez Pillet, Director of the National Solar Observatory (NSO); and Dr. Nicky Fox, Deputy Project Director of Solar Probe Plus.
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1. What is the Carrington Event? In 1859, British astronomer Richard Carrington was projecting an image of the Sun on a sheet of paper when he noticed a white flash of light. Less than a day later, telegraph lines from London to Bombay were fried and the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis, or Northern Lights and Southern Lights, normally seen at the poles, were visible dancing across the sky above Baltimore and Cuba. A coronal mass ejection (CME), defined as a large explosion of magnetic field and plasma from the outer layer of the Sun, had slammed into Earth’s magnetic field.
“The Sun has solar storms all the time, and these solar storms randomly come off the surface and go out in any arbitrary direction. In 1859, the Earth just happened to be in the way,” Mountain explains. “The magnetic fields from these big solar storms — somebody in the film describes them as ‘intergalactic electromagnetic tumbleweeds,’ which is not a bad description — came our way, and the Earth’s magnetic field was lined up in such a way that this event actually coupled with our own field, rather than just bounced off.”
“You look up and you see Northern Lights, and it just looks so beautiful in the sky, but there’s actually a big current system that’s flowing right over your head,” Fox says. “As you put more and more energy in from the solar wind into Earth’s magnetosphere, you actually drive those auroral circles bigger and bigger and they move down further and further towards the equator. Now you’ve got power grids that normally wouldn’t be worried about auroral currents overhead. When you get a current system that’s flowing over a power grid, those currents can actually go and flow through that power grid and cause transformer damage.”
In today’s technology-driven world, a surge of that magnitude would take out power grids, GPS systems, and the Internet. A coronal mass ejection on the scale of the Carrington Event is believed to impact Earth roughly once every 100 years — which means we’re overdue. And as we’re in the middle of the Sun’s 11-year cycle between solar minimum and solar maximum — and there’s a higher probability of events at solar maximum (around 2022) — time is of the essence to learn how to predict a strike.
Right now, the only way we’d know a CME is headed our way is when it’d pass by satellites roughly a million miles away — giving us an estimated 48 minutes notice. “It’s a bit like the buoys of Hawaii — the first thing people know about a tsunami is when the buoys of Hawaii start going up and down very rigorously,” Mountain says. “What you really want to do is to be able to predict when these things leave the solar surface. Once it leaves the surface, we now have 48 hours to make corrections. That’s a much better place to be.”
Grids could be powered down to prevent the kind of damage to transformers that would take months to repair. As FEMA Director Craig Fugate explains in the film, “If you know and have a plan, then hopefully the power will be out for hours to days. Because the system was warned, took steps, protected itself, and now we are talking about re-starting the system versus having to rebuild the system.”
2. What’s being done now to help us predict CMEs? There’s a two-pronged approach covered extensively in the film: the aforementioned world’s largest solar telescope and the Solar Probe Plus.
The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST), with a 4-meter mirror, is currently being built atop a mountain in Maui, Hawaii, to study the Sun’s surface in never-before-seen detail. “Just by the way of comparison,” Pillet say, “when I started astronomy, people were using 4-meter telescopes to observe galaxies. Now we’re going to have a 4-meter telescope, but we’re pointing this to the Sun. We need to see where the physics happens in order to really see what is triggering all these events and perhaps start developing capabilities to predict them.”
In the summer of 2018, the Solar Probe Plus will be launched to study the mysteries of the corona, the hazy outer layer of the Sun’s atmosphere that is the birthplace of space weather. It’s trying to solve two mysteries: to begin with, how can the corona be hotter than the surface of the Sun itself? “You know that when you move your hand away from a fire or a hot plate it gets cooler, right? I mean it’s just physics. The Sun’s corona actually gets hotter as you move away from it — and we don’t know why,” Mountain says. “That energy is probably related to magnetic fields, and it is magnetic fields which generates all these problems with solar flares and things. And so what we’re trying to do is build a system which is complementary: Solar Probe Plus is going to fly to this very tenuous and incredibly hot thing called a corona to try and understand how it is being powered, and DKIST is trying to look at the surface and depths of the Sun to try and work out how the physics of the physical Sun and its surface couples into the corona.”
“Understanding what’s going on in the corona,” Fox says, “how these pieces of solar material get heated and energized so dramatically that they can actually break the Sun’s gravity and move away from the Sun, and how they change in the corona — that will help us to be able to say how the space weather will impact us here on Earth.”
Fox has been working on the Solar Probe Plus project since 2011, but sending a spacecraft close to the Sun is something scientists have dreamed of for 60 years. They just had to wait for the technology to catch up. “The Earth and the Sun are 93 million miles away. We’re going to within just 4 million miles away from the Sun. I like to say, if you started on the Atlanta Falcons’ zero yard line, you’d run 96 yards of the football field — that’s how far in we’ll go to the Sun. So it’s certainly very challenging because it’s hot. We’re going to be facing temperatures in excess of 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, and we’ve got to keep these instruments in an environment where they can work,” she says. “We have to keep the heat shield between us and the Sun at all times. We’re moving at speeds approaching 125 miles a second, and yes, I do mean a second. So if you just imagine moving that fast and keeping this spacecraft oriented all the time, then it’s almost like fishtailing in the snow around a corner — that’s what we have to keep doing to make sure the heat shield stays in the right place. We’ve got an active system on the spacecraft so if it realizes that it’s starting to turn a little bit too fast, then it will immediately rectify itself by firing thrusters to make sure that we’re keeping that heat shield there. So we’re moving faster than anything has ever moved before, we’re going closer and hotter than anything has ever had to deal with.”
3. What can we, the people, do to help? The answer is simple: Support science research. In October 2016, recognizing the threat of solar storms, President Obama signed an executive order to engage agencies in building a master plan. (Smaller CMEs have wreaked havoc as well: In 1989, there was a nine-hour outage of Hydro-Québec’s electricity transmission system. In 1967, the U.S. almost began WWIII because it thought the Soviet Union had jammed surveillance radars. In 1962, an American Air Force Pilot on a covert mission ended up in Soviet airspace thanks to unexpected Aurora Borealis.)
What Mountain wants to do is raise awareness. “It is very hard to get peoples’ minds around these black swan events, where they’re rare but have huge consequences,” he says. “You do have some people, politicians, who have spoken in public saying, ‘These are so rare, why do you even worry about them?’ And it’s like saying, ‘Well, don’t worry about earthquakes in Los Angeles.’ We go through a lot of trouble in earthquake zones to build buildings that are robust against earthquakes, because the consequences of not being prepared are enormous. Investing sufficient funds and putting the work in means life carries on even if you have a fairly serious earthquake. … When you get knocked over by a bus, that tends to be a rare event, and we tend to buy life insurance for such things. It’s just being responsible and smart. It is very important when it comes to the Sun and solar weather, given the enormous dependency. Everybody today uses GPS, whether it be a farmer or myself this weekend when I got lost in Venice, you know? You pull out your phone to try to work out where the hell you are.”
The Solar Probe Plus, Fox stresses, is a part of NASA’s “Living with a Star” program, which looks at the science that affects life and society. “So it isn’t just doing science for pure science sake, it’s actually got a benefit to life and society,” she says. “Even though we might sound very fancy when we say we’re gonna trace the flow of energy throughout the corona, what we’re really doing is understanding how our Sun is changing every day and how that impacts us here on Earth. So yes, supporting science research is so important because without it we wouldn’t know we even had a solar wind. We wouldn’t know we were affected by the Sun. We wouldn’t know that that great big flash two days later caused a major power outage somewhere. [Questions] have baffled scientists for decades and decades, and we’ve gone as far as we can with remote sensing, by taking pictures of the Sun, taking great movies of the Sun. At this point, we now need to go up and touch it and give you that other kind of sensory experience to be able to really tell you what’s going on.”
The Dark Side of the Sun, narrated by Sting and directed by Nathaniel Kahn and Paul Bozymowski, premieres Feb. 11 at 10 p.m. on Discovery. Science Channel will broadcast the film Feb. 12 at 9 p.m. In addition, throughout Science Channel Weekend on Discovery, Discovery will air science-themed programming including last year’s Telescope, Mythbusters, Mythbusters: The Search, and What on Earth?.
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