The Day Our Sun Cause Darkness
Humans have evolved technologies for making their life more simple and luxurious. Electricity can be considered to be one of the most significant discoveries of all time. It’s even replacing our dependency on fossil fuels, running the electronic equipment all around the globe and beyond that too. It’s impossible to think about a world without electricity but we might have to face it sooner or later.
We all know electricity is renewable energy so it won’t be exhausted. In the movie Fate Of the Furious of Fast and Furious saga, there is an equipment EMP that the hero and his team steal, it's mentioned there that it could take out all electrical equipment within a range. Dom even demonstrates its effects near the climax. In a Mollywood movie, NINE also has a similar plot due to interaction with a comet. The former is actually possible but to blackout our earth, huge amount of energy is required, and guess what, the reason for our existence, the one supreme source of energy, our ticking time bomb is a devil.
What’s the relevance of this now?
On July 3, A solar flare occurred and the regions of Antarctica and the Atlantic ocean blacked out. A solar flare capable of a geomagnetic storm is also of high possibility.
Our sun’s magnetic field changes direction around 11 years. So after that, an event called solar maximum occurs and the sun becomes more violent. Around by 2025, this event will happen.
Simple Science of an EMP
EMP is not radioactive energy even though it’s a product of nuclear detonation. So, When a detonation happens, EMP produces a pulse of energy that could produce a powerful electromagnetic field that could fry up electrical equipment in the given range. Every bit of it will be damaged and the loss is huge.
Due to the nonlethal nature, it hasn’t been used during wars but the powerful nations have developed non-nuclear EMP sources which are restricted to a relatively small area.
How does Sun become a cause?
Our Sun produces energy by nuclear fusion which we receive in the form of heat and light. It also ejects tons of electromagnetic waves which is fatal for us. Apart from this, it posses high electric and magnetic fields that undergo drastic changes in a short amount of time due to the presence of highly charged plasma particles. So, the sun ejects these plasma particles, solar winds, and solar flare.
A solar flare is a sudden, rapid, and intense explosion on the surface of the Sun that happens when massive amounts of energy stored in magnetic fields are suddenly released. The solar flares coming from sunspots are even more powerful. Sunspots are small dark spots on the surface of the sun where the temperature is relatively low to the surface temperature. These spots appear due to a change in a magnetic field and the energy is contained there.
The possibility of such a flare interacting with our Earth is high. Our Earth has also a magnetic field around it which saves us from these charged particles and EM waves. The aurora lights in arctic and antarctic regions happen due to these interactions.
Coronal Mass Ejection is the deadliest of these. These ejections are directional and contain coronal material which has a high magnetic field. We can consider it as a missile fired towards us. If we come on this path we could be in danger. These particles take time to reach us, unlike the light these particles take around 2 -4 days. When solar flare and coronal mass ejection happen simultaneously we have the geomagnetic storm or solar storm.
Has it happened before?
Yes, numerous times.
The Carrington Event
It happened in September 1859. A solar coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth’s magnetosphere and induced the largest geomagnetic storm on record. The dependency on electronic and electrical equipment was very low at that time. The telegraph lines spanning about 2 lakh kilometers got damaged and all other equipment also went down. An astronomer Richard Carrington discovered that this effect was due to the sun.
The Railroad Storm, Quebec Power Blackout of 1989 are also in the same manner.
What will be the end results?
The earth's magnetic field is not very powerful and these ejects could trigger geomagnetic storms. These geomagnetic storms would damage each and every electronic piece of equipment. The satellite will be damaged, GPS system would go down. Cell towers, transformers, power grids everything will be damaged. These could happen and in worse conditions could lead to climatic disruptions. We will witness lots of different colored auroras in the skies. Our economy would collapse.
We can't be sure about the complete effects as we have not witnessed them on a full scale recently.
Is there anything we can do?
Well, we can shut down the power grids and other equipment but still, these would be damaged due to the induced current by the magnetic field. Other than that we can't do anything more as of now.
We have been monitoring the sun to study the formation of these sunspots and possible ejection of solar flares etc. We don't have enough info yet. These predictions could go wrong but the probability of happening is not low. There are lots of events happening on Earth that we can control yet we are not doing it. Space has lots more surprises for us.
