Alaska researcher finds extreme solar storms could pack an even bigger punch<\/p>\n
Published 10:30 am Saturday, September 5, 2026<\/p>\n
According to new research involving a University of Alaska Fairbanks physicist, scientists may have underestimated how severely an extreme solar storm could disrupt satellites and power grids.<\/p>\n
The study published July 15 found that Earth\u2019s magnetic environment may not have the upper limit on disturbances that researchers previously believed existed, meaning that the effects of a major solar storm at Earth\u2019s surface and in near-Earth space could be as much as twice as strong as some previous estimates.<\/p>\n
Do\u011facan \u00d6zt\u00fcrk, an assistant professor of physics at the UAF Geographical Institute and College of Natural Science and Mathematics, is among the study\u2019s co-authors.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are grossly underestimating our preparedness for it because we haven\u2019t accounted for uncertainties in how we measure solar storms,\u201d \u00d6zt\u00fcrk said.<\/p>\n
Solar storms occur when activity from the sun sends charged particles and magnetic fields toward Earth. The resulting geomagnetic storms can interfere with satellites, radio communications, navigation systems and electrical grids. Geomagnetic storms are ranked on a scale from G1 to G5, with G5 considered the most severe.<\/p>\n
Researchers had previously believed there was a point at which increasingly extreme solar wind conditions would no longer produce proportionally larger disturbances in Earth\u2019s magnetic field. However, the new study suggests that apparent limit may instead be the result of uncertainty in how the solar wind is measured.<\/p>\n
Scientists typically measure the solar wind at Langrange Point 1, or L1, about 930,000 miles from Earth in the direction of the sun. Those observations give researchers advance warning before the solar wind reaches Earth. But conditions can change during that journey.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe measure solar wind far away from Earth, and it gets altered in random ways before reaching us,\u201d said Nithin Sivadas, the study\u2019s lead author and a researcher with NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Catholic University of America. \u201cSo what we measure is an uncertain estimate of what actually strikes our planet.\u201d<\/p>\n
The solar wind also begins slowing when it reaches the Earth\u2019s magnetic field at an area known as the bow shock. Turbulence and waves can then further change its properties before it interacts with the planet.<\/p>\n
Those uncertainties can make it appear that a particular disturbance in Earth\u2019s magnetic field was caused by a stronger solar wind than actually reached the planet. If previous disturbances were caused by weaker solar wind conditions than researchers assumed, a much stronger storm could produce effects beyond those predicted by existing models. The findings also raise questions about how scientists define and prepare for the most severe geomagnetic storms.<\/p>\n
Government agencies develop scenarios for events that may occur only once every 100 years and use them to assess risks to infrastructure, including electrical systems and satellites.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese worst-case scenarios are widely used to set safety thresholds, which industries and even agencies can adopt to establish reliability standards,\u201d \u00d6zt\u00fcrk said. \u201cOur current way of measuring does not really reflect the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n
The study\u2019s authors said the findings suggest researchers need to account more carefully for uncertainty when interpreting solar wind measurements rather than assuming observations taken far from Earth precisely represent the conditions that eventually reach the planet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alaska researcher finds extreme solar storms could pack an even bigger punch Published 10:30 am Saturday, September 5,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":884767,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,66],"class_list":["post-884766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=884766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/884767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=884766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=884766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=884766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}