Solar Storm More Powerful Than 10 Nuclear Bombs Exploded Outside Earth, Scientists Reveal

A new study has revealed that a solar storm caused a massive explosion that’s more powerful than the largest nuclear bombs created by the U.S. According to the authors of the study, the explosion happened just outside Earth’s doorstep.

Solar storms occur due to a disturbance on the Sun’s surface. These can travel across space and affect Earth depending on their severity.

In a recent study published in Nature, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, focused on a solar event that occurred in December 2015. According to the researchers, Earth was bombarded by a powerful solar storm during this time.

Usually, particles from solar storms are deflected away by Earth’s magnetosphere, creating a stunning light show over certain areas known as auroras. However, in some cases, these particles get tangled up in the magnetosphere, causing the magnetic lines to move away from each other. This often leads to high energy blasts.

Most of the time, these explosions in the magnetosphere happen very far from Earth. However, the researchers noted that the solar event in 2015 happened very close to the planet.

“Usually, these explosions happen at least 100,000 miles from Earth, far downstream in our planet’s magnetic tail,” the study’s lead author Vassilis Angelopoulos said in a statement according to Space Weather Archive.

“On Dec. 20, 2015, however, we observed a reconnection event only 30,000 miles away–more than 3 times closer than normal,” he continued.

The data presented by the researchers was confirmed by the information collected by NASA’s THEMIS project, which is composed of a series of satellites that study the energy being released by Earth’s magnetosphere.

As noted by the researchers, the energy produced by the solar storm’s explosion was more powerful than multiple nuclear bombs or strong earthquakes.

“The explosion and subsequent storm delivered as much as ~88 PetaJoules (88 x 1015 Joules) of energy to the near-Earth environment,” Angelopoulos explained. “That’s more than 10 times the energy of the largest US nuclear bomb and about 20 times the energy of a magnitude 7 earthquake.”

If not for Earth’s magnetosphere, this type of solar storm would have caused severe damage to various facilities on the planet. Due to the highly-charged particles of solar storms, a direct hit would cause Earth to experience wide-scale power outages and disruptions in satellite-based technology for a long period of time.