Satellites may fall, the internet could disappear, and humanity might decline: the Sun is preparing a series of dangerous solar flares for Earth.

What Was and What Will Be

Five years ago, scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder, led by Yuta Notsu, became extremely concerned about the behavior of the Sun. In 2017, individual flares reached a maximum classification level of X9.3. One of the largest occurred in November 2003. According to Stephen Drake, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, it had a power designation of X45.

Colorado astronomers, using space telescopes, discovered that some stars similar to the Sun—of approximately the same size and class—exhibit incredibly poor behavior: 43 "solar siblings" observed occasionally erupted with so-called "super-flares." Their power far exceeded "ordinary solar" flares—those that have graced us so far.

The conclusion: our Sun is also capable of such catastrophic events, the causes of which remain mysterious and render these events unpredictable. But they are expected.

There is only a Chinese hypothesis suggesting that "super-flares" occur due to the collision of waves from two or more much weaker events. For example, this happened on July 3, 2012. A kind of resonance—overlapping waves from coronal mass ejections occurring 15 minutes apart in different locations on the Sun—led to a flare comparable in power to the Carrington event. The speed of the plasma ejected from the Sun exceeded the "ordinary" by several times. We were simply lucky that the burst was directed away from Earth.

However, what specifically triggers more catastrophic events remains unclear.

It was believed that "mature" stars—like our Sun—flare up with "super-flares" once every thousand or two years on average. However, a recent article in Science by Valery Vasiliev, Alexander Shapiro, Ilya Usoskin, and Natalia Krivova—our compatriots working in Germany at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research—provided more alarming estimates.

Data from 56,450 stars collected by the Kepler space telescope showed that from 2009 to 2013, 2,527 sun-like stars produced 2,889 "super-flares." The statistics reveal that they occur approximately once every hundred years—ten times more frequently than previously thought.

By the way, Colorado astronomers, even with a frequency of "super-flares" once every thousand years, warned at the time that such a cataclysm on the Sun could happen within the next hundred years.

Why the "Heart Will Not Settle"

There are several reasons for concern. First, according to official data, the Sun has reached its peak activity, after which—around 2026—it will enter the so-called "battle zone." During this period, which occurs every 22 years, the Sun's magnetic field vigorously provokes powerful flares. Its activity increases by about two times.

Second, the Sun has already emitted flares that can be classified as "super." This means they could recur.

Heliophysicists often cite the so-called Carrington event, which occurred on September 1, 1859—quite recently by astronomical standards. At that time, young English astronomer Richard Carrington noticed unusually large spots on the Sun, which erupted with a dazzling flare. After 17 hours, night turned to day over many parts of the planet—even over Cuba, Hawaii, and the Bahamas. The sky was illuminated by green and pink auroras. The telegraph system failed. Sparks flew from the devices, shocking telegraph operators and igniting paper.

Now, after such a "spit" towards Earth, all electrical networks would burn out, transformers would melt, satellites would be damaged or lost, and the internet and computers would go down. This is the least that could happen.

Third, more monstrous cataclysms are not excluded. Scientists from Japan's Nagoya University, led by Professor Fusa Miyake, discovered traces of one such event. In cross-sections of ancient cedars and oaks that grew in Europe, they found evidence of a powerful energy impact that increased the content of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in the wood by 20 times.

By analyzing the annual rings, the Japanese determined that the radiation spike occurred in the year 775. Its source was an X-ray super-flare from the Sun, whose power was 20 times greater than that which burned telegraph devices. Thus, this medieval flare could be classified roughly as X2000.

The damage from a "super-flare" at the level of the Carrington event is estimated by scientists to be approximately $20 trillion. This is comparable to the GDP of the United States. Life on Earth might survive. However, human civilization would likely not recover from such immense material losses and would degrade—or even disappear altogether.

BY THE WAY

It Couldn't Get Worse

A large group of astrophysicists, led by Steve Mairs from the East Asian Observatory in Hawaii, determined the power of a "super-flare" that erupted in 2016 from the star JW 566, a solar-class star located in the constellation Orion, 1,500 light-years away from us. They determined and were horrified: it was 10 billion times more powerful than typical solar flares. If such an event were to happen on our Sun, it would mean the inevitable end for Earth. The ejected material would instantly incinerate everything around. The amount of X in that "super-flare" is beyond counting.