This year many Arizonians caught the sight of a lifetime — the Northern Lights danced in our sky. Now imagine those lights but one hundred times brighter. This kind of event is known as a Miyake event. They are so powerful it would completely fry the internal components of your phone.
Named after Fusa Miyake, a Japanese physicist, these storms were first discovered in 2012 after research on growth rings in trees showed spikes in radioactive carbon isotopes, known as carbon-14.
These events occur when the sun's electromagnetic field weakens which allows large masses of plasma to escape the sun's surface. As it races to Earth, it interacts in the atmosphere with our carbon and creates this isotope. Since carbon-14 only comprises less than 1% of the atmosphere, when large ejections occur, the number can increase.
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Lead Research Scientist and Associate Research 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 high precision measurements of carbon-14 in tree rings and looked for very unusual high rates of concentrate of those isotopes in time that could be related to the super solar events."
In the study, the professor said they "discovered six of these Miyake events in the past 14,500 years."
Since these events are so rare, there is limited data to work with. Panyushkina explained, "There is no pattern detected so far." This makes forecasting or creating a model to forecast very difficult.
This research is still relatively new as Panyushkina described the findings as "opening the pandora box." They hope that further research and understanding of these rare events will help them develop forecast models and build the infrastructure to protect power grids and communication systems if a Myika event occurs.
