Supposedly we just missed a Carrington level event that the sun farted out of the single hole it's now sporting.
I saw some reputable reports it may have been an X class flare, but that's it. We get those all the time. Wrecks HF for a while, maybe some aurora, but that's it. No suggestions at all it was a Carrington level event.
It looks like it occurred on the 5th anniversary of the July 2012 "Superstorm", which some say was close to a Carrington level event (had it been aimed at the Earth, which it was not). Perhaps there was some confusion in the media?
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/23jul_superstormIt sounds like to get such an event, you need a series of CMEs that clear the path. So it is really a very unique event. A single large flare won't do it:
A paper in the March 2014 edition of Nature Communications by UC Berkeley space physicist Janet G. Luhmann and former postdoc Ying D. Liu describes the process: The July 23rd CME was actually two CMEs separated by only 10 to 15 minutes. This double-CME traveled through a region of space that had been cleared out by yet another CME four days earlier. As a result, the storm clouds were not decelerated as much as usual by their transit through the interplanetary medium.
"It's likely that the Carrington event was also associated with multiple eruptions, and this may turn out to be a key requirement for extreme events," notes Riley. "In fact, it seems that extreme events may require an ideal combination of a number of key features to produce the 'perfect solar storm.'"
"Pre-conditioning by multiple CMEs appears to be very important," agrees Baker.
Topic: As our Sun ages, it's possible we may see fewer sunspots. (Read 2120 times)