This year, many Arizonans got to see the sight of a lifetime: the The Northern Lights danced in our sky. Now imagine those lights, but a hundred times brighter. This type of event is known as a Miyake event. They are so powerful that they completely destroy the internal components of your phone.
These storms, named after Fusa Miyake, a Japanese physicist, were first discovered in 2012 after research into annual rings in trees showed spikes in radioactive carbon isotopes known as carbon-14.
These events occur when the Sun’s electromagnetic field weakens, allowing large amounts of plasma to escape the Sun’s surface. As it races toward Earth, it interacts in the atmosphere with our carbon and creates this isotope. Because carbon-14 only makes up less than 1% of the atmosphere, this number could increase if large releases occur.
Lead researcher and associate professor Irina Panyushkina at the University of Arizona explained that “tree rings capture those isotopes through CO2 and photosynthesis.”
In a recent study by Irina Panyushkina and her team of scientists ‘they developed extremely precise measurements of carbon-14 in tree rings and looked for very unusually high concentrating rates of those isotopes over time that could be related to the super-solar events. “
In the study, the professor said they discovered “six of these Miyake events over the past 14,500 years.”
Because these events are so rare, there is limited data to work with. Panyushkina explained: “No pattern has been detected so far.” This makes predicting or creating a model to predict very difficult.
This research is still relatively new, as Panyushkina described the findings as “opening the Pandora’s box.” They hope that further research and understanding of these rare events will help them develop prediction models and build the infrastructure to protect power grids and communications systems if a Myika event occurs.
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