The Supermassive Podcast - Don't Panic…but a solar storm could be a disaster

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

It's been 166 years since scientists recorded the world's most powerful solar explosion. Izzie, Dr Becky and Dr Robert Massey are big fans of anniversaries, so they investigate how the Carrington Event affected the Earth - and why something similar today could be devastating.Thanks to Kate Bond from the Royal Astronomical Society and Matthew West from ESA's Vigil for joining us on this episode.Join The Supermassive Club for ad-free listening and to share you questions, images and more. Or email them to [e-mail] or on Instagram @SupermassivePod.The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media production. The producers are Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Solar flares can release the same amount of energy as hundreds of thousands of years worth of global human energy consumption. If we had a storm with this magnitude again, we'd be in serious trouble. People are always like, are you afraid of getting sucked into a black hole? I'm like, no, have you heard of the guarantee of it? Hello and welcome to the supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society. with me, science journalist Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smeatherst. It's been 166 years this month since the Carrington event. So to celebrate that somewhat weird milestone, this episode is all about solar flares, coronal mass ejections and the missions that are trying to detect them.

What do you mean, Becky? Everyone celebrates 166 years of any major event. If any of us make it, I'm sure we will be as well. And obviously, Dr Robert Massey is here to the Deputy... director of the Royal Astronomical Society. So Robert, bring us up to speed. What was the Carrington event? Well, there's actually a nice connection with the RAS for this one, the Royal Astronomical Society, as we'll see later on, there's a record of it in our library. And if you want to look at the discovery papers, the original drawings, you can do that for free online. And monthly notices

the Royal Astronomical Society to do a kind of plug for our journal there as well. But the key thing to understand is on the 1st of September 1859, two astronomers, Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson were independently observing a really big sunspot group. So the kind of things we see actually in years like this one when the sun is near its maximum level of activity. And they were both, by the way, using safe methods. I did check this. One was projecting it. The other one had a really dense filter to protect their eyes. Yeah, it's good to know. Nobody sacrificed their eyes for exactly. It's always important to know when you read these things. And what they saw as they were looking at these sunspot groups, even in white light, they saw these brilliant points of light

that they describe Richard Hodgson I think describes it as being like two brilliant stars brighter than the surface of the sun's extraordinary sight and we now know that these are incredibly powerful solar flares they lasted about five minutes and unusually the coronal mass ejection that followed and that's often the case you get these big clouds of material sent towards the earth charge particles

burps that follow flares yes the solar burps and that hit the earth really quickly within about 18 hours which normally they take three days or so is about the rule and that shocked our magnetic field caused brilliant displays the northern lights and induced really powerful electrical currents on the ground as well now there wasn't much of a power system but there was a telegraph system and that was enough to overload some of the telegraph systems burn them out or just people disconnected the batteries and they were still able to operate

so you know it was described as having an impact on the Victorian internet the telegraph system and we think this is the most powerful geomagnetic storm in recorded history, you know, at least since the invention of the telescope and, you know, a time when we'd have been able to observe these things. So, and a similar one, as we hear later on, would have a really big impact today. Yeah, it is crazy, isn't it? And I keep thinking about how big this would have an impact on today. People always ask this question, and it's like, let's stop think about it.

Let's just like, people are always like, are you afraid of getting sucked into a black hole? I'm like, no, have you heard of the character of it? Anyway, cheers, Robert. We'll catch up in a moment with some listener questions. So how I'm concerned should we be about solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and is there any way we can possibly prepare for them? Daniel West is the mission scientist

for a proposed e-submission called Fidgel to monitor these powerful events and their impact on Earth. But my first question to him was, what exactly is a solar flare? A solar flare is a massive, release of energy, radiation, into space, from near the solar surface, the solar atmosphere. And solar flares can release on the order of 10 to the 25 to 10 to 26 joules of energy, the same amount of energy as hundreds of thousands of years worth of global human energy consumption.

Yikes, that's quite a lot. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. One of the most powerful things in the solar system, it's intrinsically related to, to the magnetic fields within the sun. So the sun itself is a massive ball of plasma in space. And within this ball of plasma, it's got magnetic fields inside of it. And the sun doesn't rotate like a solid body, a little bit like a liquid,

and the magnetic fields within the sun can become wound up over time. And what happens is, as these magnetic field configurations get more and more complicated, they can reach a point where they're able to actually undergo a process known as magnetic reconnection, where the magnetic field lines break and reconnect. And as they do so, they're able to release the energy and the plasma, which is actually trapped on those magnetic fields. I think I remember someone explaining it to me, like, it's like if you've got a ball of rubber bands

and you keep twisting it, and eventually something's going to snap, and it's that sort of kick out, would you say, yeah, I mean, you're nodding along here. Okay, so that's solar flares. Now, there are these things called coronal mass ejections as well. So what are they and how much attention do we need to pay to them? Right. So solar flares are these massive releases of radiation, and often related to them are these eruptions of plasma into planetary space,

and these are all coronal mass ejections. So these eruptions coming from the sun. Whereas the radiation from a flare will arrive at the Earth at the speed of light, these eruptions can take a few days to get to Earth. So eruptions are often related and produced at the same time as a solar flare. Even though they're often connected, and often if you see a big flare on the sun, you can expect to see an eruption. That's not always the case. If we see an eruption without a flare, that's called a stealth event, a stealth CME, or stealth chronomass ejection.

And if we see a flare without an eruption, they're called confined flares. And it may well just be that we cannot observe the other component of this, but they're often related. So the flare is its massive release of radiation, and the chronomass ejection is an eruption of plasma towards the earth. take three or four days of magnetized plasma, and the particles that are in the eruption can interact with the Earth's system, the Earth's magnetosphere, and the energetic particles related to the eruption can stream through our magnetic field, producing the aurora, like we saw last year in May and October when we saw the low latitude aurora, that was related to eruptions on the sun. So you were working on this mission called Vigil. Tell us about that. What is it?

and what is it setting out to do? Vigil will be the European space agencies and the world's first space weather monitor going to a position in deep space called the fifth Lagrangian point. Some people might be aware of the fact that there's a gravitational balancing point between the Earth and the Sun.

This is called the L1, the Grangian Point. But there's a couple to the sides of the Sun-Earth system. And we're going to position a satellite in one of those positions. the L5 point. There's many reasons why we're interested to go there. So let's think about the chronomass ejections to begin with. If you imagine you're trying to measure the speed of an arrow coming towards you. It's quite hard when it's coming directly at you to understand what the speed is. The best place to look at the speed is to stand to the side and look at it

in profile from the side. So when we're at the L5 point, bear in mind the eruptions we're interested are the ones going towards the Earth. We'll be able to see them in profile from the side and get a really accurate estimate of when eruptions are going to hit the Earth. A lot of space weather monitoring is not that we can stop space weather, but it's making sure that the power companies are informed when they might have to reduce the load on their system or when the perhaps the aviation industry might need to fly at slightly low altitude. You don't want to do it all the time because it costs money, but we'll be able to better inform them on these things. The other advantages about being at the L5 point is we talked about flares before.

Flares travel at the speed of light, so by the time we're aware of them, they've already happened. But what we do is when we're forecasting flares, we have what are called probabilistic forecasts. So generally, you're kind of looking at regions of activity on the sun, and you'll basically look at, has the activity been increasing over the last few days? And that will help you understand if you expect to see more activity and more flares. And so because we're at this point around the side, we're going to see a little bit around the back of the sun. And so we'll be able to see regions of high activity around the back of the sun that will soon be rotating towards the earth.

I was looking at a diagram of sort of where this is going to sit. I was amazed to see just like, actually you do get to see a big portion of the sun, which, I mean, it sounds obvious. That's so key in all of this. So what's on board? How is Vigil actually going to be able to monitor this and give us that heads up that, you know, there is some solar activity going on and Earth might need to put some sort of action plan in place? Right. Okay. So we have got a payload of six different instruments. And the first thing I love to highlight is the fact that this is a massively international team.

The UK is at the forefront of this. We're building Vigil in a way that it can withstand this harsh radiation environment. and the strongest events that the sun can throw us. We have two in-situ instruments that's going to sit on the satellite, and it's going to measure the local environment. We have the mag instrument, which is a magnetometer, and we also have a plasma analyzer. What they are going to be informing us about is the one thing I didn't talk about before was how we have this constant stream of particles coming from the sun.

This forms the solar wind. you can imagine the sun rotates and these particles that are coming out it's almost like a sprinkler system you might have in your garden that rotates and so this jet of water or this jet of plasma from the sun this sprinkler will rotate over visual first of all so we'll get an idea of what we might expect in a few days when this solar wind streams come towards earth so that's the first two instruments and then we've got a set of four remote sensing instruments

And so here we're thinking, imagine your camera taking photos. And we use specialized filters for looking at particular things. So firstly, we have something called a coronagraph. That allows us to see the kind of diffuse, relatively dim atmosphere of the sun around the edge. And this allows us to track eruptions in their infancy and how fast it might be going. And we do have an extension of that, something called a heliospheric imager. and the heliospheric imager is basically an extension just in one direction towards the earth. We have an EUV instrument, an extreme ultraviolet instrument.

They've decided to call this Jedi. I love that, of course they have. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And the Jedi instrument has got two different cameras on there, one called S-Walk and one called E-Walk. There you go. Died in, it's going to observe through three different wavelengths. It allows us to observe the sun. and the active regions on the sun,

darker regions on the sun, which can produce fast solar wind streams. And then, very similar, we have an instrument called a photosphoric magnetic imager, the PMI instrument. And this instrument is going to basically allow us to reconstruct the magnetic fields on the sun. So we have a good idea of the magnetic activity

and the magnetic complexity of structures near the solar surface. It's so comprehensive. There are so many different things wrapped up in here. And so where is Vigil at at the moment in terms of its development? Like what stage are we at at the moment? That's a really good question. So one thing that we have to make very clear with Vigil is that it's an operational mission.

It's not a science mission. With a science mission, you pick a question and you're trying to answer it. With an operational mission, you have requirements that you're going to make a specific set of observation. to help something in our case, it's to make space weather forecasts. And therefore, our instruments rely on heritage. So all of the instruments we have on board are very similar to instruments that have been flown. And they're currently going through their review process to make sure that they are meeting the requirements for our operational needs.

And we're currently going through the review phase and just starting to actually use spanners to construct. the instruments. It's going to be around 2029 where we actually start integrating the instruments onto the actual spacecraft itself with anticipated launch in 2031. Thank you to Daniel West. Okay, so Becky, we've had quite a lot of responses when we were going to be doing an episode on vigil and massive solar events. So listener Adrain 111 asked if we could talk about the Punch mission. So this is a NASA mission that launch on the 11th of March of this year, 2025. So what is that about? Yeah. Oh, I'm really glad someone asked about this because Punch sort of went under the radar a little bit during its launch, right? It didn't get much coverage, right,

at all. I have to admit, I was just like, what? What? This launched this year? How? What? It's it. It's one of NASA's fleet, right? NASA has a big fleet. It's fine. People don't hear about everything. But Punch stands for polarimeter to unify the corona and heliosphere. So let's go through all those words that didn't make sense to everyone. Corona being the outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere, right? It's the thing that gets up to like millions of degrees. It's the thing you see during solar eclipses once the moon's boxed out the sun and you can finally see this extended corona. We don't really know why or how it gets that hot. So that's one big open question. You've then got the heliosphere. That's the like sun's bubble of influence.

influence. It's how far out its solar wind goes. That sort of stream of parcels are constantly coming off of the sun before, you know, it sort of peters out right at the edge of the solar system. And we don't really know when the corona, which we class it as the atmosphere of the sun, turns into just solar wind and just this bubble of influence of the sun. We don't know why it has all of the structures that it has, how this affects the solar system beyond giving us aurora, you know, on Earth and the rest of the planets. So the hope is that by studying the polarisation, of the light with punch, it can shed some light on this, pardon the pump. And we love it. We love it. So punch is going to use four suitcase-sized little satellites to map the region where the sun's corona transitions to the solar wind. So we talk about polarization. We talk about, you know, waves of light being aligned, right?

So we can imagine a wave of going like up, down, up, down, right? You can rotate that up down, any which direction that you want, right? but if you align the wave, then the up-down bits are all going at the same angle, essentially. And this can happen when, you know, particles such as electrons actually scatter sunlight and they actually align all of the waves. So if there are charged particles from the solar wind in higher concentrations, we'll get, you know, polarization coming off from those electrons when it's scattered. So Punch is going to measure that polarization so that we can see what's happening,

like that boundary between like atmosphere of the sun, and then when you just get to sort of being the general solar system inside, the heliosphere in this bubble of the sun's influence. And Punch has so many more sensitive cameras, wide a field of view, so it looks like 90 degrees at once, basically. And all we have to do is sort of, it's going to be positioned sort of around the earth, so we just have to wait for the earth to be along its orbit to get this like 360 view of what's going on. So compared to previous instruments, it is going to be great. And I hope it can answer some of the, uh, the big remaining questions that

we have about the sun. Amazing. And so we've had another question from a listener, Elle Rose Young, and I want to expand on that because all of this, obviously we're all talking about the sun and massive solar events here. How important is the sun's cycle in all of this? And Elrose specifically wanted to understand why the sun has that solar maximum of every 11 years. Yeah, that's a big question. So, I mean, during solar maximum, the solar wind can be way more intense and erratic, whereas it tends to be very stable during solar minimum. And these solar flares and the coronal mass ejections that Robert was talking about before, they also released these large bursts of energetic particles that significantly impact right, solar wind, space weather here on Earth, as we heard about with the Carrington event as well.

And Punch is going to record all of that. It should hopefully help us understand these things better. So yes, the fact that sun is just coming down off solar maximum at the minute is probably be going to be quite useful for us in terms of understanding all of this and then if we can you know have punch up there for a long time we can hopefully you know then track okay well what's happening in solar minimum as well as to why we have some solar maximums and solar minimums you know sort of a solar maximum every 11 years or so it does vary a little bit like 9 to 14 sometimes right the reason why is because the sun's magnetic poles flip so if you can imagine that on earth right If the North Pole became the South Pole every like 10 years or so, there'd be chaos.

Campuses would just be, you know. So when the flip is happening, the sun is very stormy, right? Because essentially all those magnetic coronal mass ejections and solar flares is all because of the magnetic field getting tangled up and funneling charged particles places. So you can imagine when the magnetic field is flipping what that does to the sun's sort of atmosphere and producing all of these coronal mass ejections so it becomes very active very stormy very turbulent place it just embraces the chaos basically during solar maximum when it's settled down though is when you get solar minimum it becomes very calm and there aren't as many of these sort of

magnetic events where you end up funneling these charged particles into flares and into coronal mass ejections as for why the solar flip happens still a little bit iffy on on why to be honest. Again, it's one of those sort of big questions that we still have. A study did come out in 2017, though, I found, and they modelled the interiors of stars and what was going on. And they suggested it was to do with rotation rate. So a faster rotation rate, more often you get a flip in the magnetic field and you're more likely to begin driving a lot more turbulence of these moving charged particles leaving to more activity. Okay. Oh, that makes sense. I mean, it's just one of those big head scratches, isn't it? Yeah. The sun, eh? We didn't really know much about the sun. It's not just like a constant ball of gas in the sky. It's just like...

Doing so much up there. We couldn't do an episode about the Carrington event. I'd not take a look at the Royal Astronomical Society Archives. The Society was left two of Carrington's nightbooks and they contain his notes from observing the biggest coronal mass ejection on record from September 1859. I met up with Kate Bond's assistant archivist

in that room at the Royal Astronomical Society and for long-term listeners, no, I did not recreate that scene from Beauty and the Beast. We are in one of my favourite rooms. We're in the council room with floor to ceiling covered in books and we've got two very exciting books in front of us.

This is all because we're here to talk about Carrington and these are his notebooks. So before we get onto these, lovely looking books. Talk us through it. Who is Carrington? Well, Richard Carrington was an important figure for the Royal Astronomical Society. I don't think you could call professional astronomer at the time. He had worked at Durham Observatory, but then left and set up his own observatory in his own house. He had already received a gold medal from the RAS for star observations. He published a star catalogue. But what we've got here are his Sunspot observations.

which he'd been doing since 1853. Oh my gosh, that's a very long time. I mean, this episode is about the Carrington event, but that is, I mean, that's six years later. Well, observations need to have a long pattern of observing before you get your results, as I'm sure everyone will understand. So how was he taking these observations? And we'll look at some of these books in a moment,

but what exactly is he noting down and looking at? So Carrington's observing Sunspot, and there was excitement over what exactly sunspots were. Did they cause any effect on Earth? There had been a project started by Edward Sabine in the 1850s regarding electromagnetism and set up a magnetometer at Q. So Carrington had switched really from stars to sunspots, observing them to see their patterns and what they were doing.

On September 1st, 1859, a huge... group of sunspots hoved into view and he's recorded them down. He didn't directly look at them through his telescope. He'd be pleased to know because otherwise he'd be blind. He projected them onto a sheet of white glass so it's glass-painted white and then drew the observations and he had a little cross-quoise on his telescope so he could work out his calculations. He was literally dividing it into like a grid system of the sun and be like, okay, so this appeared and that, wow, that's amazing. So we've got here two books,

one of which shows the giant disc of the sun. And it, I mean, it's a huge book. If we go and have a look at this first, I mean, it's A3 size, it's huge. We've got the massive archivist pillows to support it whenever we come here. It's a very thick book. There must be a lot of observations in here.

And in the middle, we've got a hand-drawn, perfect circle, which is the sun. And then in the middle, of it all these little intricate black sunspots basically that have been drawn and then it's got this grey sort of swells around them where they've got all the different types of activity so we've currently got it set to the big day can we go back a few pages please we've got a page in front of us which is august the 25th 1859 if you imagine the plane of the sun at three o'clock

we've got this huge bulge of activity there's a big sketch in that corner where you can see it's just about to move round and so if we go to the next page yeah so we're august the 28th and that has come across a little bit more into the centre and then he just drops two days and it's now september the first and this is not just the sun spot activity but then he sees what we now call a solar flare and he's the first person to have written down his observations on it there was another astronomer called richard hodgson who also saw it but unfortunately his observations don't exist anymore. These were the first kept observations of a coronal mass ejection.

It's amazing. If we look at this one on the 1st of September, they are huge events. I mean, it's not just one or two. There's a big cluster or sunspots sort of towards the top. The west north quarter. Yeah, the western quarter of it. That's a good way of filling it. And then there's another one sort of in that eastern quarter as well.

And there's not just a few. There's a lot, aren't there? It looks a bit like, it's not very nice description, but intestines in the stomach. It's just a huge mass of items and objects just all squished together. Yeah, it looks almost like if you ever see the picture of a storm sort of from space looking down on Earth. That's kind of what we're looking at here on the sun. I don't think I've ever really seen anything like it. Yeah, this is absolutely huge.

And then bear in mind he observes sunspots for the past six years or whoever. If you turn over the page, he doesn't do it again. again until September the 11th and I just don't understand why when you've just seen the biggest thing in your whole career that you suddenly stop and don't do it. Yeah, I mean a 10-day break between seeing

the biggest sunspots of observational history is quite baffling. Well, yes, I think he might have been running around trying to check if anyone else had seen anything similar so that could explain it. It's a couple of hours on a horse to get to Greenwich. He probably was running around the country trying to get someone to say they'd seen it too. And so can we go and look at this second book?

It's smaller in size. It's maybe just a bit bigger than A4. And it's opened on a page where we can see these two sunspots more illustrated in the book. And then underneath them each are a series of coordinates, which are all of his details. So what are these actually measuring, Kate? They're measuring where the sunspots are and their size so that he can track them. because although we've got the second volume that shows on the Sun's disc, he also needs to have the maths to back up where everything is.

These are what these columns represent. Now, there is a really interesting note on the top of this page. Can you read it out for us, please? So, bear in mind, he's spent the past six years observing sunspots. He has written, too busy cutting trees to watch for a repetition on the day that he sees a solar flare. Surely if you see something that you have no explanation for, you'd be glued.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I don't know what's going on there. The fact that he's disappeared to go and sort of clear out some trees. Why? Why are you doing this now? I think we need to get a time machine to go back to that specific point. One to see it and then be like, what are you doing? This is incredibly diligent. I mean, you can see this in his work.

His observations are meticulous, his writing is beautiful. his entire life was wanting to be a professional astronomer. He was an extremely good one, and I just don't understand why he went off there. Yeah, the great unknown. I don't think we'll ever know. And so let's talk about the impact of what we now call the Carrington event. He obviously was not calling it that at the time. But what would have been the impact on Earth?

Well, what happens is a humongous solar storm hit the Earth, causing auroral displays going far further south than they'd previously been recorded and far further north and then they'd previously been recorded. There are anecdotes of people waking up in Canada and thinking it was daylight when actually it's three in the morning and that the glare from the northern lights

they could read a newspaper by it. More importantly, completely disrupted telegraphic communications which although it's fairly in its infancy at that time, It's the only way you can communicate with people over long distances, and the telegraph network in most instances was completely rendered useless. Telegraph operators had to switch off their equipment, often at great personal risk, because they'd be electrocuted, FARS was started,

and some telegraph operators could continue to send messages with all their equipment sent off due to how magnetised their equipment was for hours afterwards. Bear in mind that this is a world that technology is not so important for day-to-day life, they don't use GPS, they don't use satellites. Nowadays, if we had a storm with this magnitude again, we'd be in serious trouble. What was the impact of this reading on the astronomical community? Were they interested in it?

Certain people were, certain people weren't. George Erie didn't think it was particularly important. And he was the president of the Royal Astronomical Society at the time. He was also the Astronomer Royal. So he's an incredibly important man. And also they had slightly fallen out because Carrington had lived. a cigar at a council meeting and Airy thought that was beyond the pale. But there are personality clashes amongst quite a few people in this period.

Visarly it was Aries protege, Mauder, who demonstrated that there was a correlation way later, like 30 years later. Thank you to Kate Bond from the Royal Astronomical Society. This is the supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, astrophysicist, Dr Becky Smythurst and science journalist Izzy Clark. So another journalist has been in touch, Sarah Webb, and she has asked, Any relation? Yes.

No, who knows? Who needs? Who needs? I need to get ready to touch with her. Sarah asked, what would you do if satellites went dark for a week from a major coronal mass ejection holiday of panic? It's made me realize I wouldn't do very well. Really?

I think I'd just go camping for a week and be like, bye. Yes. What a shame. That's what I thought. Can't do anything. I fully went, oh, yeah, I would go on holiday, yes. It would be a bit stressful. But one, I don't have a car.

So how am I getting somewhere? Because trains would be bad. I use my debit card to pay for everything. So I've got zero cash. But my parents do live 10 minutes around the corner. So I think my first thing I'd just probably pop around. It would just be like, hello, are you okay? Just to let you know this thing has happened.

Yeah. Now, you said that actually. Yeah. How would I get to the place where I was camping? because I rely on GPS way too much and I couldn't navigate with a map these days no, probably could, but still, yeah, I think I would just use it as an excuse

not to do anything for a while. Sorry, Corona message. What a friend. I mean, no one could email me, so actually. But all those people, you remember during COVID when people were like, well, you know, Newton came up with his Law of Gravity during lockdown of this, whatever, and you were like, all right, yeah, sure,

way to make me feel bad about taking a holiday during a Corona Massage. Yeah, exactly. Anyway. Robert, how about you? Well, I think I'd like to think I cope, but that's probably wildly optimistic. I mean, you know, I would, yeah,

I'd definitely be on my bike. I could navigate, but I guess it's all the sort of food deliveries and all the financial systems and all that stuff being going down. That would be a huge issue, right? So having a bit of cash would help. Not sure I'd have enough cash on me, though,

to last a week, so we'd have to see you. Not if not if shopkeepers are getting quite fussy about the amounts they took as well. I mean, look, I guess it's a sort of national resilience thing, isn't it? This was added to the risk register in, what, 2020, 2011, something like that. So you hope at least that there are some systems in place to deal with this stuff. Because I think the navigation of long distances by cars and even planes and so on, you can sort of get by. You know, like the cars, a lot of cars still don't have GPS older cars and they still manage. But I think it's that the financial transactions would be a biggie and would be pretty chaotic. And, you know, I think it's just you shut down. stock markets i guess you see how we're going to write it out and you just hope that there's some resilience in the system for things like food deliveries so we can sort of shop without chaos the the food thing is is really making me feel like i should have like you know when you watch these programs of like i have a bunker in my house and i have an like i feel like i need to have like a corner of my

garage now that is like that's the emergency food that's the space weather emergency that's the space weather emergency corner of my garage we're all living off like tin fish and suddenly everyone's growing their own vegetables like just in case because i'm not like oh i'll go camping with what food becky like yeah yeah it's true how how good are you catching rabbits you know so yeah oh sarah what a great question i think it shows that we we need to all plan that little emergency corner of our lives journalists once again proving that they ask the hard hitting questions okay so becky here's another question from david green who asks hello supermassive podcast team what can you tell me about the solar flares that preceded apollo 17 is it true if

astronauts had been on the moon they could have met an unpleasant end thank you kindly and warm greetings from the most easterly point in north america newfoundland canada uh newfoundland yeah great question david uh yeah so for those who don't know a big solar flare happened in august 1972. Now Apollo 16 had just returned to Earth in April, 1972, and Apollo 17, the last Apollo mission, was then scheduled to depart in December the same year. So this was a big concern for NASA and their planning because if this had happened during an Apollo mission, it would have been a huge deal for the astronauts on board because they wouldn't have been protected from that flare by the Earth's magnetic field. The Earth's magnetic field is our best

friend, it literally acts like a second skin. It deflects away all of these high energy radiation particles, you know, away from us here on Earth. There's huge amounts of radiation in like the solar and coronal mass ejection. So think, you know, effects of a nuclear bomb or a nuclear fallout like Chernobyl, right? You immediately have things like radiation sickness, radiation burns, essentially because the radiation causes your cells. I mean, I'm not a biologist, but essentially it's a bit bad. It's very, very bad. Thankfully, the command module of Apollo has a lot of radiation shielding, not just for this purpose, but also because, you know, high-indy radiation in space, like cosmic rays are a thing just normally during space travel as well. So if the astronauts had been on board the command module, then they would have been, you know, protected from, say, let's say 90% of the radiation, which is good.

but it's not great it would still be way more than you're exposed to you know on earth because they're outside the earth magnetic field so there still would have been some serious concerns over the health of those astronauts if they'd been on the moon in just a space suit at the time which spacesuits i mean that it's essentially like just wearing a piece of paper when it comes to high-inty radiation right it would have done absolutely nothing the effects would have been much worse you would have had immediate radiation sickness you know, that could have led to death very, very quickly for those astronauts. You know, think about, like, after the Chernobyl disaster,

there were people that immediately died from radiation burns and radiation sickness. It would have been exactly the same thing. It's also, oh, sorry, Becky. I was just thinking this is also like a big deal for Mars missions, right? Yeah. Hypothetical Mars missions, right, you know, a six-month flight there, six-month flight back, odds are there are going to be some coronal mass injections in that time, you know, and it's a serious consideration.

So I think even Issa did a study on this and looked at just ambient background radiation. They said under the best circumstances, you get more than your lifetime exposure, allowed lifetime exposure during a Mars mission. So it's really difficult, even if, you know, even with shielding and everything else. And, you know, people keep saying NASA are aiming for a Mars mission by like 2035. And I keep thinking, well, I don't really want that, but at least they're aiming for solar minimum. You know, oh, wait, we saw the maximum again by that point, won't it? Because it's still a minimum of five years.

Okay, scratch size. And CME has happened any time. time. Well, so that, yeah. And this is the thing is that, you know, even if you don't have a coronal mass ejection at that time that exposes you on the moon or in the module or on Mars or whatever it might be, there is still a huge increase in your risk of cancer later in life, you know, in a lifetime's exposure in such a short space of time, you know, you're not just volunteering for the Mars mission, you're volunteering for perhaps serious health defects later in life as well. So it was a big deal when that happened in August 1972 and there was a lot of discussions

on NASA about whether to go ahead. Obviously the unpredictability of the sun meant that they could have cancelled it and then nothing happened, which was the case in the end. But if that had hit, say, you know, when the astronauts were on their way to the moon, most likely the mission would have been cancelled and they would have done some sort of emergency return to Earth to receive immediate medical treatment. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Thank you, Becky. Great answer. And Robert, Greg Chambers asks, climate change is a thing. Most of the world scientists agree that it's human made. However, there are some that argue that solar flares and coronal mass injections increasing on frequency and intensity could cause similar effects to the ones we're

observing with climate change now. How true is this? Keep up the good work. Thanks, Greg. Well, I mean, the answer is that flares and coronal mass injections on their own, they're hugely powerful events, but they're not adding a lot to the kind of heat and energy budget that's coming from the sun towards the earth. It's more about the kind of effects they have on our magnetosphere and the associated things that then might cause consequences for life on earth that we've heard about. And they're also very temporary as well. So they only last a few hours or so maybe, you know, a couple of days at most. They don't have a significant impact on our climate. However, there has been discussion and sometimes I don't think entirely, you know, it's a slightly disingenuous

discussion about the fact that a more active sun has a slightly higher output. It's a bit brighter and a bit hotter, and you get a slight impact on the Earth's climate over the course of the solar cycle. So the difference between a very active and very inactive sun, solar minimum to maximum. So that can change the temperature on Earth by about a third of a degree, maybe a half a degree. But when you consider that anthropogenic global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions, so methane and carbon dioxide and so on, has already warmed our planet by, you know, very close to 1.5 degrees, you can see that it's by far the dominant cause of climate change. You know, it's like you've got this rising trend

and this little cycle on top of it that's just oscillating that. But on its own, sadly, it's not as simple as that. You know, it is true that if there was some big secular change in the sun, it could have an effect. But if you've got a rising temperature anyway, it's just going to be background. So, yeah, we still need to do something about climate change. Yeah, I think the really obvious argument for that as well,

you know, the famous sort of stripe diagrams that show, you know, sort of the blue and the red and the lines for all of the years, right, that have been above or below average. Like, if it was to do with the sun, that would be a nice pattern, isn't it? Red and blue, red and blue. Yeah, every 11 years, right, it would be different. So, yeah, the fact that that's not there, I guess, is sort of the obvious one. Also, I went to uni with a person called Greg Chambers.

So if that's my Greg, hi, Greg. If it's not my Greg, then, hi, Greg. Okay, I'm Becky. Nat K-Cat asks, why do red dwarfs flare so often and violently? And no need to skimp on the math on my account. Oh, I might skimp it on my account. But yeah, yeah, the strongest flare we have ever, ever, ever seen. Came from a red dwarf for DGCVN, you know, great name.

Catching. It's short for something that's impossible to pronounce, so I'd prefer the DGCVN. Moving on. But yeah, it was called a super flare because, I mean, it outshone the entire sun, you know. You know, there's super flare that lasted a few seconds. So it's kind of crazy that it came from such a small star in comparison to the sun, right? About 10th of its size, Red Dwarf. So in all honesty, again, not really sure about this one. But do you remember before I talked about that study that said there was something that

thought to do with how fast stars spin and the faster they spin, the more often you do get these flares. Well, red dwarfs being pretty small, spin fairly fast. And so because of that, the internal dynamics of all of that, gas you can imagine everything getting churned up we also think that red dwarfs like the only sort of internal heat distribution is only by a convection you know you have this sort of like flows that get set up where you get like heat rising and the heat rising yeah so that leads to a lot more tangling of all the magnetic field lines that are generated by these charged particles that make up this

like you know plasma gas of stars and so that's what then causes all of these flares and can make them much stronger as well because of the fast rotation rate and more of the tangling, despite the fact that these stars are so much more. This is a challenge for habitability of planets around as well. It's like if you've got these big flares with very large amounts of radiation, what does that do to a planet that has to be quite close to the star? Because it's a cooler star. Yeah, fair enough. El Scorcio, I'd say.

Yeah. Well, everyone who's hoping for Trappist 1, it's like, oh. Turn down. Red dwarfs might not be the best ways to look for life. Sorry about it, okay. Yeah, now there is hope that maybe, you know, if you have quite an older red dwarf star, it has settled down some.

And so really, if you're going to look for life, you should look around an older red dwarf star, which live for way longer than the sun's going to live, you know, like billions and billions of years. So maybe, maybe, but young red dwarfs. Yeah, I'm not going anywhere near a Sigma value. Let's put it that way. Okay, and Robert Pepper on Instagram.

asked, could a solar storm shield positioned at Lagrange Point 1 be effective? Yeah, I'm giving this a bit of thought, Pepo. So L1, Lagrange Point 1 is the stable point, the gravitationally stable point between the Earth and the Sun, about 1.5 million kilometres away in the direction of the sun. And some scientists and engineers have suggested not a solar storm shield, but we could put a giant shield there to slightly reduce the amount of solar radiation hitting the Earth as a way of cooling the planet a little to offset climate change. so in line with the question we were thinking about earlier on.

And that might work. I don't doubt there's quite a lot of work to do on its practicalities, but if you're interested, there's a paper in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Istvan Shepudi that sets how it might be done. Now, however, I think using the same shield to protect the whole Earth and space weather seems a bit more complicated because the shield designs, they're fairly light

because you've got to construct it in space. That's going to be a pretty hard thing to do to make something at least 1,000 kilometres across in space. We haven't done anything like that on Earth, let alone in space. And it would have to protect the planet from highly energetic particles that I think would penetrate most of the shield designs. They would basically go through it. Maybe they'd be reduced a bit,

but I'm not sure it would be anywhere near dense enough, given the designs and talking about something which is millimeters, centimetres, centimetres thick to do that much. And I also wonder about the magnetic field lines, which are not, you know, not typically not nice straight lines and whether the stuff would just, a lot of it would just flow around it. there's also a phenomenon when you get say coronal mass injections coming towards the earth quite often we think oh yeah there's an aurora aurora on the way there's a big geomagnetic storm

coming and it doesn't happen because of the shape of the interplanatory magnetic field changing and all those things so maybe it would work but my thought is really we just need to concentrate on making our earth-based systems a bit more resilience make sure that our satellites can cope with it make sure our power grids can cope with it too rather than putting too much emphasis on on a space space solution. Okay. Well, that's it for the questions this time. So keep them coming. We do love reading them. You can send them to podcast at rass.ac.ac.uk. Or find us on Instagram at supermassive pod. So shall we finish with some stargazing? Robert, what can we see in the night sky this month? So October is still one of my favourite times of the year. You know, you've got the colours of autumn

during the day, lengthening nights of the stars. And before it gets too cold, so it's a really nice time. And this month, we've still got just hanging in there, the summer triangle of Vega been out a very obvious it gets dark so always say you know get your pair of binoculars out look up and down the Milky Way because it's such a great sight and the stars of autumn are starting to come into view as well when you've got the large and under under city skies what appears quite empty big square of pegasus which oddly is divided between pegasus and andromeda andromeda of course has the famous galaxy as well which is really easy to see in binoculars as a sort of elongated haze or even with your eye if you're in a dark site and below those you've got constellations like

Pisces and Pisces Austrinus which is the southern fish and this very bright star foam low down in the south it's the southernmost first magnitude star you can see from the UK and in terms of planets Saturn is really bright and obvious in Pisces so under the square of Pegasus but bright yellow dot it'll appear and the rings are slowly opening up a bit so it's looking a bit like its usual self again which Becky will be relieved to hit cute

Jifter is getting easier too and rising mainly just for the like when you do you know outreach events with kids and stuff like that's not happening yeah it's a bit weird to show them Saturn without the rings isn't it it's really cool that the rings she says grumbling that she can't see the rings and anyway

Jupiter is getting easier too and rising in the late evening in Germany so you know 11 p.m onwards or so it would be there at its best in January next year it'd be really good for the UK because it's going to be very high in the sky then and if you're an early riser Venus is still just about good in the morning sky as well so have a look in the east you know

once you get into October, of course, it's, you know, we're more likely to be up around dawn than we are, so in the middle of the summer. And two other sites to try for are, of course, given the episode, the Northern Lights, because there are better odds of geomagnetic storms in spring and autumn, slightly better odds. And it's getting darker that much earlier, too. And one thing I thought, challenging target, if you're in a dark place and up early, you could have a look for the something called the Zodiac or light that I'm not sure we've talked about much in the podcast. No, but we should get Brian May on. We should. That would be. That would be a cue.

Yeah, if you're listening, Brian, we'd love to have you talking about this. It's a speciality. It's caused by the fact there's interplanetary dust distributed through the solar system around the ecliptic planes, the bit where the planets go around the sun. And at the right times a year in the UK, basically spring and autumn at the times to see it, you would need to look, so in the autumn, you need to look about 90 minutes before astronomical twilight starts to the first hints of proper dawn, and you can find that on websites like time and date and so on.

it will tell you when that's going to happen. So you need to be up quite early, basically. But if you've got a really dark sight and you're looking to the east, there is a chance of seeing this beautiful cone of light. I've only actually ever seen it about a quarter of a century ago from Zimbabwe where, of course, there were much clearer skies and also being really close to the equator really helped as well. But if you see it, or better still photograph it, obviously, tell us, tag us on our social media accounts.

We'd love to see that. Absolutely. And I think that's it for this. Oh, my voice just disappears. And I think that's it for this month. We'll be back next time with an episode on something that I will work out in the next few weeks. And contact us if you try some astronomy at home. It's at Supermassive pod on Instagram or email your questions to podcast.

at r.as.ac.org. And we'll try and cover them in a future episode. Until then, though, happy stargazing.