'Cannibalistic' solar storms: a threat to Earth?

As if we didn't have enough with the heat wave hitting the Earth, the sun has pissed off. In the early hours of last Tuesday, sunspot AR3363, to the southwest of our star, produced a solar flare that scientists call by the not sobering name of cannibal, and the most imminent forecast is that there will be more.

To the naked eye, it looks like an explosion on the surface of the sun that raises a gigantic cloud, or an arm of light that wants to escape from our star.. Technically, it is a coronal mass ejection, solar plasma traveling with the solar winds at a speed of 800 kilometers per second, charged with enough energy, according to NASA, to power the US for a million years.. The plasma ends up crashing into our planet in a matter of days, causing a geomagnetic storm, which is the main reason why we have the sun under constant surveillance by the scientific community.

Last Sunday three flares were detected that caused radio blackouts. In fact, according to NASA, they are not harmful to human beings on earth, something that astronauts cannot say, nor can passengers on flights that pass near the poles receive small doses of radiation.

The extreme consequences of these storms would be blackouts, and the collapse of network systems such as the fall of the internet, already predicted on many occasions each time these events occur.. Luckily, the last time an event of this type occurred, there was not even the Internet, it was on September 1, 1859, and scientists call it the Carrington event because that was the name of the British astronomer who recorded it, and who knocked out the telegraph network for 14 hours and caused northern lights at unlikely points on Earth.

Scientists believe that these events only occur every 500 years, and they can predict this because the sun's cycles are measured in periods of approximately eleven years, which is how long it takes for the sun's magnetic field to reverse.. The cycle begins when magnetic activity is minimal, and ends when it is maximum, an event that will occur in the summer of 2025, in which these violent and explosive events will multiply.