The sky was flooded with an extremely intense reddish light shining brightly for several days. Although one of the most memorable events in our recent history was the failure of Quebec’s electricity grid in 1989 when a 12-hour blackout left millions of people in the dark, blocked elevators and closed tunnels, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before the next solar storm affects Earth’s technology.
No one knows when such a storm headed toward Earth will erupt, which occurs when the sun shoots up boiling plasma in the form of solar flares and winds. That is one of the reasons why scientists are dedicated to analyzing our history looking for the few similar events that we have witnessed. Now, a team of researchers from Cornell University (USA) claim to have discovered new eyewitness accounts of a solar storm that in 1582 stunned sky watchers around the world.
“A great fire appeared in the sky, towards the north and lasted three nights”, exposes one of the stories of Pedro Ruiz Soares, an eyewitness and Portuguese author of a chronicle of the event in the 16th century. A “display of red fire in the sky” or “rays of fire arose over the castle that were terrifying. The next day, the same thing happened at the same time but it was not that big and scary. Everyone went to the field to see this great signal “, reads in another of the observations of eyewitnesses of the time.
In feudal Japan, watchers in Kyoto also beheld the same fiery red image in their skies. Similar accounts of strange night lights were recorded in Leipzig, Germany; Yecheon, South Korea; and a dozen cities in Europe and East Asia.
They did not know that it was a massive solar storm and they did not know the connection between solar storms and Northern Lights, which hit the Earth on March 8, 1582 and was comparable to those of 1909 and 1989 but, to us, the inhabitants of today day, it helps us to predict future solar activity.
But, if the Northern Lights are mainly seen at high latitudes on Earth (and not normally at lower latitudes, such as Portugal), how did you see one? It turns out that one of the things a powerful solar storm can do is this: It can make the Northern Lights appear closer to Earth’s equator.
Will it be repeated? When?
Experts say we should expect at least one super solar storm like this for a century. “It may be a once-in-a-century occurrence and ‘you can expect one or two in the 21st century,” experts say.
If a similar solar storm were to hit our modern world , it would cause billions of euros in damage and cripple power grids around the world, so we need to be as prepared as possible.
The team hopes to use this data to develop better prediction models, specifically when NASA plans a lunar mission again in 2024.
Reference: Portuguese eyewitness accounts of the great space weather event of 1582V.MS Carrasco, JM Vaquero Department of Physics, University of Extremadura, arXiv. 2021
