The Unseen Fury of Solar Storms
July 25, 2025 at 01:02AMNot many people think about space weather—it’s not something we can see or feel. However, it is something that could have a far greater impact on us than any storm on Earth. Henry Wismayer meets the people who spend their lives monitoring solar storms, and explains just why we need to keep an eye on what our sun is doing.
It was also one of the first times a solar event disrupted human technology. As the sky blazed overhead, telegraph operators in America and elsewhere found that Morse code messages sent across electrical wires failed to transmit. In many cases, their machines fizzed and spat fire or short-circuited completely. American Telegraph Company employees in Boston, having disconnected their malfunctioning apparatus, found that they could communicate with Portland, Maine, 100 miles north, using only the auroral current. Unseen, something alien had suffused the telegraph wires with an electrical charge.
What Carrington had witnessed would come to be known as a “white-light flare,” a prelude to a massive CME. As he watched, the points of light became “enfeebled” and then vanished. His famous sketch of the start and end points of the erupting sunspot suggested that, over the course of the eruption, it had migrated 35,000 miles across the photosphere.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/24/the-unseen-fury-of-solar-storms/
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