The Carrington Event
The First, and Strongest, Observed Magnetic Storm in History
September 1, 1859, found amateur astronomer Richard Carrington in his private observatory on his estate just out of London sketching sunspots. Shortly before noon, Carrington saw what he described as a ‘singular outbreak of light lasting about five minutes.’
Already recognized for being the first to figure out the position of the sun’s axis of rotation and to realize that the sun does not rotate as a solid mass but travels faster at the equator than at its poles, today Carrington another first to his list — the first to observe a solar flare.
Carrington and the world did not know what effects, if any, solar flares had on Earth.
They would find out roughly seventeen hours later.
A geomagnetic storm is a major, though temporary, disturbance of Earth’s magnetic field when energy from the solar wind strikes the Earth.
Geomagnetic storms are caused by what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center calls Coronal Mass Ejections, or CMEs. CMEs are billions of tons of plasma that erupt from the sun during solar…
